There’s Treasure Everywhere!

I love gardening. As someone who doesn’t own property, I have always been grateful for access to land to cultivate a garden, whether it was a town community garden plot or space on a farm owned or managed by a generous neighbor. There’s nothing quite as grounding or satisfying as getting my hands in the dirt and tending plants.

However, gardening can be full of frustration and disappointment. It can be exhausting. One’s labors can be many and one’s successes few.

Gardening dye plants comes with a particular irony for me. You can’t eat them. They are not, strictly speaking, necessary. One can certainly live without dye plants. Why go to all that trouble?

I started writing this post in the summer of 2020. We had a dry spring. We had a dry summer. As of May 2020 our part of the state was under “significant” drought conditions, which persisted through the fall. We were lucky never to get to the “critical” level that other parts of the state faced. You can check out the map of drought conditions in Massachusetts here, with updates posted throughout the summer and fall. I spent a ridiculous number of hours hauling gallons of water via car, which comes with a fossil fuel burden, trying to keep a couple beds of woad alive. I gave up entirely on the bed of flax I planted in April.

Honestly, why bother?

I know why I love making dyes with plants. Color is beautiful and beauty makes me happy. To be able to participate in this process of beauty-making helps me feel connected to, and part of, the many incredible forms of life on this planet. Creating color feels magical and meaningful. It is mind-boggling and humbling that plants can give these colors to us, over and above all the other gifts that plants bestow. Medicine, food, fragrance…. Oxygen alone would be enough!  I am deeply grateful to plants for all their lessons and awe-inspiring power. “Hey, need some color to brighten your day? Let me help you with that.”

But sometimes I look at all the abundant color that grows freely, of its own accord, with no effort expended on my part, in the fields and roadsides all around me, and wonder why I work so hard to maintain a dye plant garden. July and August (when I first started writing this post) are especially good times to reflect upon the abundance and take stock. There’s treasure everywhere (to quote a beloved line from Calvin and Hobbes).

Calvin and Hobbes There's Treasure Everywhere

It’s the middle of winter now. Gardeners are planning gardens and ordering seeds, or feeling glad for seeds saved. What to devote garden space to, and what to gather by the wayside?

Here are a few of the most prolific dye plants in my neighborhood, photographed in June, July, and August of 2020. I will save a discussion of the use and implication of terms such as invasive, noxious, and opportunistic for another day. Hopefully “introduced” or “naturalized” are accurate enough for now.

Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota) is an introduced species from Europe that can be found everywhere. It makes a lovely cool, clear yellow. It readily fills in marginal spaces along the side of the road, next to railroad tracks, and under power and utility lines.

It also fills in fields and open places. It is so prolific that I usually use just the flowers for dyeing, but I suspect the foliage gives similar colors. Also, it smells delicious when the dye bath is heating up!

 

Next up, tansy (Tanacetum vulgare). It is also introduced from Europe. It is also quite aggressive. It is another source of yellow, albeit stinkier. It’s more on the gold side of yellow, a bit more brassy or brown than Queen Anne’s lace.

Purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) is yet another introduced species from Europe. It is especially known (and lamented) for displacing native wetland plants in New England, but can also be found in drier habitats along the side of the road or underneath power lines. Whatever else one may wish to say about purple loosestrife, it is stunningly beautiful and makes bees very happy.

 

Purple loosestrife can make a variety of colors ranging from tan to olive green to gray, with the use of iron. I have even read a recipe for making black, but the amount of iron and heat called for seem overly harsh for wool. I feel like it has a lot of potential as a tannin source, and I haven’t explored it nearly enough.

Also visible above is jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) which is a native species here in New England. I have never used it for dyeing. I have heard from other dyers that it makes a rich yellow or gold. Personally, if I’m gathering rather than cultivating, I tend to stick with dye plants that are generally agreed to be *too* abundant. If I’m going to use a native species, I feel that it, too, ought to be unquestionably abundant. While jewelweed is not at risk or endangered here in Massachusetts, I don’t tend to find it in wide swaths, so thus far I have left it alone.

A native plant here in New England that I feel totally fine using is goldenrod. There are several species, and I’m sorry to say that I can’t identify them all, so maybe I shouldn’t be so cavalier. The type I’ve used is Solidago canadensis, I believe, though I am not positive that I can tell it apart from Solidago odora or sweet goldenrod. Yes, it makes yellow. A cheery, intense yellow. I think it’s the most vivid when you pick the flowering tops just before they are starting to bloom, when the buds are still pretty tight and the overall color is a neon greenish-yellow. In this photo it is a modest presence amidst a collection of other plants, but you can often see it filling whole fields around here.

For now, I think I’ll wrap things up with black walnut (Juglans nigra). The green hulls from the nuts of these tall, lovely trees are a rich source of brown. Last year was actually not an abundant year for black walnuts. These were some early drops in August, and after that I didn’t find many mature nuts. Maybe it was the drought or maybe just not a mast year for black walnuts.

In a more abundant year, I can easily collect a five gallon bucket full from underneath just one tree.

To get the most intense color from black walnut hulls, you have to pick them up promptly and use them while the hulls are still green. They also smell wonderfully fragrant at this stage. If they sit on the ground too long, they start to get soft and black, and teeny little maggots start to grow. I believe that these are either walnut husk flies or walnut husk maggots, but I need to read up more about them. I find them squirmy and off-putting, but I’m sure they have their own lives to live and jobs to do on this earth, so I feel kind of bad boiling them to death.

As Calvin gleefully notes above, one of the treasures that are everywhere are disgusting grubs!

The Woad That Was

Before the woad that (almost) wasn’t, there was the woad that was. I planted a bed at the end of May, and it grew just fine.

Here it is, a teensy bit past its prime but still happy as can be, on August 7th. I harvested 4 lbs. of leaves.

I know I have posted many times about woad vats, but I never get bored of woad. After all these years, there is always something new to learn. Lately I have been trying to be more aware of the temperature at different points in the process.

I have often noticed that the woad vats I run at the end of the season, once the weather is cool (or even freezing), give more color. I had always assumed that it was because older plants gave darker blues. But now I wonder whether the cold air temperatures that bring down the temperature of the vat liquid very quickly are responsible for the enhanced color.

Recently it’s come to my attention that high temperatures reduce the amount of color you can get from woad. If this is so, then hot weather in July and August might be the reason for lighter vats earlier in the summer. To test this temperature hypothesis out in the hot summer weather, I was trying to follow the guidelines from Teresinha Roberts on her site woad.org.

I rinsed the leaves.

I coarsely shredded them, put them in another 5-gallon bucket, and poured on the steaming hot water. In the past I have always just boiled the water, and poured it straight over the clean leaves. It’s always (or almost always) worked fine. But I was trying to learn more about the temperature factor this time, so I let the water cool to about 180 degrees F. before pouring it over the leaves.

I like to fill up the bucket all the way with water so I can expel some air when I put on the lid. I topped up this bucket before putting on the lid. Once the bucket was full, the temperature came down to 160F.

Then the leaves steeped for 45 minutes. After 45 minutes, the temperature was about 150F.

I wanted to get the liquid down to about 130-135F before adding the ammonia. I had a long way to go.

At this point I realized I should have bought a big bag of ice. The few icecube trays in the freezer were woefully inadequate to cool five gallons of hot liquid on a hot summer’s day.

Here’s my puny amount of ice cubes:

I put the five-gallon bucket into the larger pot, and added cold water.

It didn’t do a whole lot to bring down the temperature. Not one jot, in fact.

As I understand Teresinha’s directions, I should have brought down the temperature while the leaves were still in the liquid. But, I felt that the thermal mass of all those leaves would just retain the heat forever. So, I strained out the leaves and put the bucket of liquid back into the ice water. I also tried to press icepacks around the outside of the bucket. It was very inefficient.

This cooling process is supposed to occur very quickly. I was not very quick, alas. But I did get the temperature down to about 140F, eventually.

I added the ammonia to pH 9. Ammonia is my preferred alkali for this because it is already liquid and I can buy it at the grocery store without advanced notice when I have failed to plan ahead. It’s purely a matter of practicality.

I aerated for 10 minutes with my back-and-forth-bucket-pouring method. It seemed very blue but not as foamy as usual.

After all that pouring back and forth, the liquid was about 135F. Not ideal, but close. Sprinkle on some RIT Color Remover (sodium hydrosulfite) and wait another 45 minutes. Ta da! Reduced. Maybe a tad over-reduced. It’s fine, don’t sweat the technique. This video is NSFW but the song is so very funky and fabulous! I felt like I had already fretted more than I ought about my failures with the temperature, and just needed to get in the groove and move along with the process.

For this vat I was using two skeins of two-ply woolen yarn from our most recent Western Massachusetts Fibershed project, spun at Green Mountain Spinnery. The white is a blend of Montadale and Merino crosses. The gray includes some Romney and Romney cross fleeces. I also used two skeins of dark gray wool-alpaca blend from New York Textile Lab. And, some kinda scrappy fleece that was either too long, too short, or too much vm to send to the mill. Hand carding is slow, but I hate to waste anything.

The white wool skein was in first for 20 minutes*, then the gray wool skein for 25 minutes*, and then I put the NY Textile Lab skeins in together a couple hours*. I left the first batch of fleece in the vat overnight*. Here are the skeins and the first batch of fleece (about 8 oz.) oxidizing in the dappled shade of a spruce tree out back the next day.

There was a lot of color left in the vat, so the next morning I put in the second batch of fleece (about 6 oz.), and left it in all day. I pulled it out in the afternoon.*

Here it is in the afternoon of Aug. 8th.* If you’ve done any indigo dyeing then you’ve seen this transformation from yellow to blue before, but it’s always exciting! Fleece still submerged in the reduced vat:

Oxygen starts to hit the fibers and the blue starts to develop:

More blue develops as the oxidation process continues:

Here you can see the fleece from the day before, which has oxidized for about 8-9 hours*, compared to the fiber that’s just getting started:

After the fibers had plenty of time to oxidize and were basically dry, I rinsed them in a vinegar solution to neutralize the alkalinity, then did a couple rinses with clear water. Here are the skeins after neutralizing and rinsing:

And here are samples of the two batches of fleece:

Four pounds of fresh leaves dyed a pound of yarn (four 4 oz. skeins) plus 14 oz. of fleece. I am pretty happy with that. Now, I realize that in order to truly compare the results of hotter versus cooler liquid, I’d need to run two vats simultaneously with all other factors being the same…. Another day.

*After I published this post I re-read my notes. I should have done that in the first place since I obviously can’t trust my memory! It’s a good thing I take notes. I realized I had made some errors when I originally wrote it. The asterisk indicates something I’ve updated since I first published the post. Sorry for the inaccuracies!

The Woad That (Almost) Wasn’t

Let me just start this post by acknowledging that I might be jinxing myself by writing it. But here goes anyway.

At the end of June I harvested woad seeds. I already have way more woad seeds than any sensible person needs. They are so beautiful I just like to watch them mature, so now I have even more.

A couple days after that, I dug over the bed, added compost, and planted more woad. In the same bed. Yes, I do know better than that, but I did it anyway. I hadn’t done a good job of planning out the location and rotation of the various beds this year, and all the other beds were full of other things. Even in a small garden, rotating beds is important. Crop rotation helps to keep the soil nutrients from getting depleted (because different plants have different nutrient demands) and helps to interrupt disease and pest cycles.

So, my first mistake was to plant woad, a nitrogen guzzling brassica with a host of possible diseases and pests, in the same bed two years in a row. I thought the compost would help with the nutrient issue, and hoped for the best.

The best did not occur. I got excellent germination, then the seedlings just disappeared overnight. Poof! Alien abduction! Or fairies. I replanted several times. Same problem. Having made my “bed” so to speak, I now had to figure out how to make the best of a bad situation.

We had an extended dry spell in the spring and early summer, then in July we had some very hot weather. I thought the seedlings were drying out in between waterings. So, on July 18th I rigged up a little shade canopy with heavy-weight row cover.

I left the bottom open for air circulation and easy watering access. I increased my watering schedule from once a day to twice a day, morning and evening.

This did not solve the problem. Someone on my Instagram account commented that critters might be eating the seedlings. There are many, many rabbits this year, and they certainly might like a little nibble of tasty woad. OK, I do not actually know if it’s tasty, I have never tried it. But it’s a brassica, so it’s probably yummy to a bunny. Woad microgreens, even. A delicacy.

I moved the thicker row cover down to make a “fence” around the bed, and used clothes pegs to cover the top with lighter-weight row cover for shade. I continued with the twice-daily watering.

You’ll just have to imagine the row cover on top because for some reason I never took a photo of it.

This strategy did not help either. Successive re-plantings were still dying off.

At least now I could rule out rabbit-nibbling. And I could rule out drying-out. There is no way the bed was drying out between waterings. In fact, it was very moist in there.

One disease I have encountered before with woad is club root, so I pulled up a few plants to see what the roots looked like.

Nothing too weird-looking there. So, probably not club root.

On August 3rd I was able to see the dying seedlings in the process of their demise. Here are some images of their sorry state:

Finally, I consulted the farmer who manages Bramble Hill Farm, Hans Leo. He suggested damping off, which is caused by a variety of molds and fungi in the soil.

Well, damping off made a lot of sense. I had inadvertently worsened the situation by making a hot, humid tent in which there was no air circulation. Recommendations for avoiding damping-off include allowing the soil to dry off between waterings, and having plenty of airflow.

Hans recommended spraying with chamomile tea to help the plants fight off the pathogen while they were small. Once plants get bigger, they are more resilient.

In fact, the few plants that had survived the seedling stage were doing great. You can see some big, healthy woad plants in the otherwise empty bed:

So, I brewed up some chamomile tea. Several years ago I was gifted a box of fancy dried chamomile, but hadn’t made much of a dent in it. Clearly this was its intended purpose!

I got a spray bottle.

I took off all the row cover. Here’s the newly unwrapped bed on August 9th:

I started spraying the seedlings every morning after I watered, and reduced the watering to once a day. I replanted once again. Here are some seedlings emerging on August 12th:

And here they are, not dead yet, on August 14th!

I am cautiously optimistic that the woad will actually grow to maturity!

If You Give a Mouse a Towel

If you give a mouse a towel, it will chew it up and make a nest. Then it will eat your flax seeds. Here’s how it happened.

Last year I grew a flax type called Suzanne. I’d never grown it before, and I planted too densely. It came up very crowded and the stalks were incredibly thin. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for fiber flax, but it wasn’t my plan and there were some negative side effects, such as lodging due to spindliness and early death of many stalks due to nutrient and water deficiency.

I harvested what seemed useful, and dried it and stored it. I will have to document the harvest in another blog post. All winter the flax lived in the back of the car, wrapped up nice and snug. It’s a relatively safe and out-of-the way place, until March rolls around and you want to collect 12 fleeces from Peggy Hart for a Western Massachusetts Fibershed project. Then the back of the car is no longer out-of-the-way. It’s prime real estate.

So, I moved the flax into the shed, despite the fact that it was still full of seed heads that I hadn’t removed. I told myself it would be OK, it was only temporary. I’d be skirting those fleeces in no time, and then the seedy flax would return to the relative safety of the car. No problem.

This was in March. Then, boom, COVID-19. School and everything closed. Time got all wonky. I was suddenly trying to teach 1st and 2nd grade via the internet. Skirting fleeces was not a thing.

Fast forward to April 12th. I went in the shed to get something else, and noticed suspicious mouse-eaten flax seed debris and mouse poop on top of the wrapped-up Suzanne from 2019. Yikes.

So I yanked it out without any photo-documentation of the mess. A verse of a song popped into my head that I’d written for myself years ago (I am not a song-writer) as a personal I-told-you-so.

“Don’t store your flax with the seeds on, for it will attract lots of mice. They’ll get fat on the seeds and leave tons of debris. Don’t store your flax with the seeds on.”

My usual flax-seed removal method is what I have dubbed the wine bottle or beer bottle method. It works equally well with any large glass jar or bottle. I got to work immediately, despite the dwindling light of the afternoon. I spread out a sheet on the front walk.

When I do this step, I keep the bundles tied together but splay out the tops so I can crush all the seed bolls by rolling and pressing with the bottle.

There was a lot more mature-looking seed than I’d expected. So, I was happy to be finally getting around to removing the seeds (traditionally called rippling), even though the timing wasn’t ideal.

I managed to get the seed bolls off about one third of the crop before the wind picked up and started whipping the sheet around and tossing all the seeds, etc. onto the lawn. Time to stop.

The bag next to me that says “Woad 2015” is actually full of flax seeds and chaff now, and will need to be winnowed eventually.

I was too busy to do any more work on either the flax or the fleeces until April vacation finally arrived. I set up an indoor space to skirt fleeces at my school, and spread out a big tarp on the ground to keep the floor clean. The tarp had been stored in the shed, rolled up neatly. The shed same shed that contained the towel and the mouse.

This was inside:

The pink stuff is from the towel. The jute is from twine. I’m not sure what the white material is, but it’s probably row cover. It looks very soft and warm indeed. Here is a close-up.

What an industrious and resourceful mouse.

Smith College Botanic Garden Show!

The show is up at Smith and it is gorgeous! Actually, the show opened way back in September. It will be up until May, so you still have time to go see it. Here’s the sign that greets you as you walk in. It makes me feel famous!

The whole concept of the exhibit was the vision of Sarah Loomis, Manager of Education at the Botanic Garden. I am so grateful to have been a part of creating it. It’s incredibly satisfying to stand in the gallery and see how it all came together.

The first sequence of panels that you see as you enter the gallery space is the primary color sequence of blue, red, and yellow. The blues are from woad, the reds are from madder, and the yellows are from marigolds.

For each color I dyed three different fibers: linen, silk, and wool. In the photo above, the linen is on the left, silk is in the middle, and wool is on the right. Each panel is 9 feet long (or tall) and 16 inches wide. The wool gauze was very sheer, so those panels are doubled. I really love the color saturation of the two layers of cloth.

Depending on the lighting and the angle, the colors look different. Looking at it from the other direction (below) the wool is on the left, silk in the middle, and linen on the right.

It’s really fun to see how people are interacting with the cloth and the space. A sign at the entrance invites visitors to touch the cloth. And people do!

The long panels create a delightfully immersive experience.

There is space to move between the panels so you can be surrounded by color.

The interpretive panels are beautiful and informative, explaining further about the historical uses of each plant:

The interactive components are engaging and fun. My favorite are the clear boxes full of dried dye plant materials that you can open up and smell. Stinky weld, sea-weedy woad, fruity madder, mmm! You can see the boxes on the stools in the photo above.

There’s also an interactive screen with a slideshow about the steps in dyeing with woad. It’s a thrill to see that people take the time to look through it!

On the other end of the gallery are the orange and green panels. Honestly, they are more pink and peach than orange, but I still think they look lovely. The “orange” shades are from weld and madder together in the same dyebath. The greens are from woad overdyed with weld.

Again, depending on the angle and the lighting, the colors look different.

Not only does each fiber take up the dye differently, they each have a different texture, too. It’s just so rich and luscious!

250th Post!

This is my 250th blog post. It feels momentous. As I anticipated this post, I tried to decide whether I should write something just about the momentousness of the occasion, or write a post that will help me catch up on the backlog of topics that I’ve been meaning to write about. I read back through some of my earliest posts to ponder the best course.

My very first blog post was about black walnuts, but it’s too early to be using those just yet. My second post was about weld. I recently used weld for my Smith College Botanic Garden project, so that gave me a “full circle” sort of feeling to mark the occasion. Weld it is. Me and weld, we go way back.

Ironically, for the Smith project I did not use my own weld. I have been growing it for years, and saving my own seed for years. However, for this project I didn’t want to blow my whole stash on one project. So, we ordered weld from Aurora Silk because they had a volume discount on 5 lbs., which is what we bought (and used).

I had to laugh at the description on their website: “Weld smells delicious, like honey, and bees love the flowers.” It is absolutely true that while the plant is blooming, bees love the flowers, and that the flowers smell amazing. Dried, it is another matter entirely. And this was the stinkiest weld I have ever smelled!

As with the madder that I wrote about in my last post, we set the weld to soak in a 5 gallon bucket on July 10th. We soaked 51 ounces of finely chopped weld. That’s just over 3lb. We didn’t have the wool gauze in hand yet, so I wasn’t using all the weld that week. Still, it was a lot by my standards. Here’s the bucket:

I took a closeup photo of the surface. I couldn’t believe how many seeds there were. Well, OK, I could believe it. Weld makes zillions of seeds. The seeds are the glistening black, tan, and yellow spherical dots on the surface, because they float:

Because I am who I am, I had to try germinating some of these seeds. They were easy to separate from the rest of the plant material:

Yes, some of them grew.

I now have Anatolian weld plants to add to my dye plant collection. I do not know whereabouts in the world my original plants came from, alas. It’s actually getting a little late in the season to put these in the ground, so we’ll see what happens.

The weld soaked overnight. As with the madder, I extracted it twice on Thursday. Again, I divided the plant material into two or three pots. Here’s the first extraction heating up on Thursday morning July 11th:

Here’s Sarah on Friday morning helping me to strain out the plant material from the second extraction:

I typically add chalk and soda ash to weld for maximum oomph, so that’s what I did. Even though weld makes fantastic yellows in its own right, this time I was using it to make two secondary colors, green and orange. For the orange, I combined half of the weld bath with half of the madder bath. I guess I took a photo of the linen on Friday afternoon, but not the silk for some reason:

FYI, I prepped the linen and the silk for the orange bath just the same way that I prepped them for madder, which I wrote about in my last post. The linen was scoured, treated with chestnut tannin, then mordanted with aluminum acetate. The silk was just washed and mordanted with aluminum sulfate.

For making green, I had decided to dye the linen and silk blue first in the woad vat that we ran on Wednesday July 10th. For many years I have had good success dyeing woolen yarns blue first, then mordanting and dyeing them with yellow to make green. I have had much less success with linen or cotton using this method. Catharine Ellis’ research convinced me that the best way to make deep greens on cellulose fibers and silk was to do the woad dyeing first. All of her blog posts are incredibly informative, but this is the one that shifted my thinking about making green.

So, I dyed the linen and silk pieces in the woad vat on Wednesday July 10th. To prepare the linen for the weld bath, I decided to use gallotannin from Earthues (bought from Long Ridge Farm) since it is a lighter tannin.

There must have been some metal contamination as the cloth sat overnight, because by the morning the liquid was dark and so was the cloth. On some of my dye pots, the handles are attached with rivets.  I’m thinking that the rivets leaked iron or other metal into the tannin bath. At first I was dismayed.

Normally I just rinse cloth with water between each step of the preparation, but I used detergent to see if the gray color would come out of the cloth. This is the color of the liquid when I washed the fiber:

Fortunately, the cloth did lighten up:

I did not save the tannin baths to re-use them as I normally would:

After the tannin preparation, I used aluminum acetate to mordant the linen. I mordanted the silk with aluminum sulfate.

Here’s the weld bath with woad-dyed linen and silk on Friday afternoon. The bath heated up to 180 degrees, maintained for one hour, then steeped the rest of the day and overnight. The pH was 9:

Yes, the silk is yellow and annoying. The linen is lovely. Here they are on Saturday morning. This is the linen:

This is the silk:

Here they are drying on the line on Saturday morning:

Here are the 9-foot pieces from that week hanging on the line on Saturday afternoon once they were all rinsed. I ended up overdyeing the silk pieces in a later woad vat:

Unfortunately, even though that weld bath was rich and luscious, it was so stinky that I couldn’t keep it for long. I ran a couple exhaust baths on woolen yarns with my Summerfun campers the following week at the Common School, but then they voted to throw it out due to its foul smell. It was great while it lasted!

Madder on Silk and Linen

During the week that I ran the bolted woad vat in July, I also ran weld and madder baths. This post is about the madder baths. All of the dyeing I did that week was for the Art and Science of Dyeing at the Botanic Garden of Smith College.

I was planning several consecutive days of dyeing, so there was a lot to keep track of.  Here I was on Tuesday night making a game plan for what had to happen when, and doing a lot of math regarding measurements and quantities:

Part of what was tricky was that I was dyeing two different fibers, silk and linen, which need different preparations. I was also running that woad vat, and the weld baths. We were aiming to dye lengths of cloth in shades of blue, red, orange, and green that week. The quantities were large, at least compared to my usual projects, and we were trying to photo-document everything and coordinate our schedules. Many logistics.

We measured out the madder and weld on the same day that we ran the woad vat, Wednesday July 10th. I wanted rich colors, so we measured the dyestuff based on 100% of the weight of the goods. The cloth that we were planning to dye weighed 51 ounces. We used the same quantity of plant material so we had a 1-1 ratio of plant material to fiber. Each piece of cloth was 16 inches wide and 9 feet long, so it was pretty heavy (the linen in particular).

We weighed out 51 ounces each of dried, chopped madder roots and dried, chopped weld. We set them to soak in buckets of water at 10 am.

Even when the plant material was dry, the volume was significant. Once the dried plant material started to absorb water, I knew it would swell like crazy. So, we soaked it in 5 gallon buckets. Here’s a close up of the madder bucket:

 

The bucket sat all day and overnight. When working with madder, I like to extract the roots twice or even three times, and let the roots sit overnight each time. Then, I combine the extractions. In this case, I had time constraints, so I only extracted them twice.

After soaking the roots overnight, I extracted them once on Thursday morning. I had to split them between three pots. Due to being distracted, I let them overheat. There was not as much liquid in each pot as I might typically have, since the roots took up a lot of room. So, they heated faster than I anticipated and I just wasn’t watching closely enough. Other pots were also heating up in other locations in and around the apartment. Multi-tasking isn’t always a good idea.

Normally I am very careful not to let madder get hotter than 150 or 160 degrees F., and sometimes I keep it lower. Typically, I get the roots up to temperature, then maintain that temperature for an hour. I also add soda ash to get the pH up to 9 or so, and add some calcium carbonate (between a half teaspoon and a teaspoon per pot, depending on the size of the pot).

In this case all the pots got up to a boil. Frothy, red dye liquid and madder root particles got all over the stove. Yikes. So, I had to stop and clean that up.

Then the roots sat and cooled off for several hours. That evening, I strained out the roots and re-heated them. This time I watched the temperature carefully, and kept it around 150. The roots soaked in the second extraction overnight, and we used them for dyeing on Friday.

To prepare the linen, I had first washed all the cloth in a washing machine, and dried it in a dryer so it would be shrunk before we cut it. After the pieces were cut, I scoured them again with cationic scour from Earthues (which you can order from Long Ridge Farm in Westmoreland, NH) and soda ash. I follow Earthues’ recommendations of 5.5% WOG scour and 2% soda ash. I bring the bath up to 180 degrees F. hold for 30 minutes, remove the fiber promptly, and rinse.

Then, I treated the linen pieces with a tannin solution. For the madder, I used a chestnut tannin at 5% WOG, heated to 180 degrees for an hour, and cooled overnight. Then I rinsed the cloth well. I hadn’t used this chestnut tannin before, and was kind of surprised at how foamy and soapy-looking it was.

It left the linen a pleasing shade of warm orange-tan.

Then I mordanted with aluminum acetate at 5% WOG, brought up to 180 degree, held for an hour, and cooled overnight. It’s a lot of steps just to get the cloth ready for dyeing.

The process for mordanting the silk was a little simpler. After washing the full length of cloth in the washing machine, I washed each piece again with the same laundry detergent, and rinsed well. The silk was mordanted with aluminum sulfate at 20% WOG. I was following Earthues’ mordanting rate, but I skipped the cream of tartar. Don’t ask me why. For mordanting, I brought the bath up to 180 degrees, held for an hour, and cooled overnight.

On Friday morning, Sarah Loomis from Smith came over around 8:30 and we got rolling with the dyepots. It had rained overnight and was raining first thing in the morning, but fortunately the rain stopped around 8. Here was the set-up. There was a lot going on:

I combined both of the madder extractions, then divided the bath in half. We were using one half to make cloth for the “red” part of the show, and the other half was going to be used to make “orange” in combination with weld.

I added more dissolved soda ash to get the pH back up to 9, and put the linen and silk pieces into the same dyepot:

I heated the bath up to 140 degrees, held it for an hour, and let the cloth steep and cool for the rest of the day and overnight. Here it was in the morning on Saturday the 13th:

I always do a delayed rinse, if I have time. I hung the cloth on the line to dry before washing it. In this photo, the madder “red” pieces are on the right:

Next up, the weld baths.

Dyeing with Bolted Woad

This summer I am working on a very exciting project in conjunction with the Botanic Garden of Smith College. They are putting together an exhibition about dye plants called The Art and Science of Dyeing, and I am dyeing the cloth that will be featured in the exhibit! It is an incredible honor and I am thrilled to be part of it. Woad is one of the plants we are featuring, and so my investment in my woad plants is especially high this year.

Last month I described the odd behavior of my woad, which bolted (sent up a flower stalk) and went to seed in its first year. Normally, woad is a biennial. The first year plant grows a basal rosette, which is a clump of leaves that radiate from the center and stay pretty low to the ground.

By July, the plants were getting big, despite their flowers. Small green seeds were beginning to form. I figured it was now or never to use them. Usually when woad goes to seed, the leaves are small and clasp closely to the stalks. In contrast, these leaves were still large and wavy, and seemed plump, lush, and happy. So, I felt optimistic.

On July 10th, the day I ran the woad vat, Sarah Loomis, Manager of Education, and a student intern named Hannah came to help out and do the photo-documentation for the exhibit.

We harvested the woad together at Bramble Hill Farm around 8 am, since it was going to be a hot day. We cut about four and a half pounds of leaves. I estimate it was half from bolted plants and half from plants that hadn’t bolted, but I didn’t separate them.

Here they are washing and shredding the leaves while I ran around heating up pots of water:

Once the water boiled, I did my usual routine of pouring just-boiled water into the five gallon bucket full of leaves. I fill it right up to the rim with just-boiled water, and press on the lid so that there is no additional air at the top of the bucket.

My typical method is to let the leaves soak for 45 minutes with the lid pressed on tightly. Recently I have read that for the maximum color when extracting indigo, it’s better to heat briefly at a high temperature, then cool the bath quickly. I haven’t tried this yet.

When you’re waiting around for 45 minutes you find something else to do. This time of year I commonly string up marigolds to dry, so that’s what we did. Sammycat watched over everything and was her usual charming and attentive self.

After the leaves extracted, I strained them, then added ammonia to get the liquid to pH 9. Then we aerated the vat. Normally I have to do this process by myself, which is kind of tiring. I pour the liquid back and forth between three buckets for ten minutes or so. It was nice to have help!

I was very excited to see a deep blue color emerge as we were aerating. I have read that second year leaves will give less color than first year leaves, so I was expecting a weaker vat than usual. At first I was optimistic that it would be a strong vat.

For a reducing agent I used RIT Color remover, which contains sodium hydrosulfate. We let the vat reduce for 45 minutes.

It looked pretty good, and the Smith folks were on the clock. I dipped in a length of linen cloth for a very short dip, then a length of silk, so they could see the color change. Linen is on the left, and silk on the right in the image below:

Things looked very typical and blue at first. Yay.

I let the cloth oxidize for a while. But since I usually put in my fiber for much longer dips, I decided to re-dip both the linen and silk several times. Some people recommend letting the fiber oxidize for the same length of time as the dip. Normally I dip a skein or piece of cloth only once per woad vat, and I dip for at least ten minutes. I feel that the color needs a long time to oxidize, and I let the fiber air-dry completely before rinsing and neutralizing. I normally wait until I run another vat to dip a piece of fiber again.

Nevertheless, I re-dipped several times in the same day this time around. Here were the lengths of cloth at 12:09. Silk is still on the right.

And again at 2:29. Fibers are always darker when wet, which is part of what’s going on in these photos. Silk is on the right but it’s wet.

After several dip-and-air cycles, I did not seem to be gaining any additional depth of color. My usual way to test whether a vat is really done is to throw in some wool. Wool will slurp up color like nobody’s business. If the vat is really dead, then the wool will let me know. If not, then I know it’s something quirky with the cellulose.

Behold the totally feeble color on wool skeins.

The weird mustard-yellow skeins were previously dyed with marigolds. The grassier greens were previously dyed with bronze fennel. For some reason marigolds and dahlias often act funky with woad. I will find out more about that some day.

So, I figured the vat was done, and I let the cellulose fibers dry out completely. The next day, I rinsed them with a vinegar solution to neutralize the pH, then a mild laundry detergent rinse, then several rinses in plain water. After the vinegar rinse, the light blue silk turned gray. What?!

With woad I do not tend to lose a lot of color when rinsing, so this color shift was a surprise to me. After all the rinses, I hung up the cloth to dry and you can see the gray for yourself (silk on the right):

The same week I also ran madder and weld dye baths, which I will write about later. But you can see the pale silk on the line with the other comparatively more vibrant colors (it’s second from the left):

Yikes! I will over-dye the silk later this summer. The dried linen is light, but typical of a woady blue. I feel it is representative of what woad can do on cellulose fibers. Color is almost always lighter on cellulose fibers, even though woad can make very rich, dark blues on wool. The pale color may be due to the weaker vat, due in turn to the reduced color available in the bolted plants. But the dried silk is so pale and gray that I can’t even understand what is going on.

I have been wondering how to think about this gray-silk-bolted-woad thing. It’s a multi-faceted problem. It has made me wonder what the difference is between a “lesson” and an “experience”. Did I learn a lesson about bolted woad? Learning a lesson has a sort of bossy and authoritarian insinuation. “I hope you learned your lesson.” “Let that teach you a lesson.” On a more positive note, it implies a principle or rule that one can refer to in the future to guide one’s actions. If I did learn a lesson, what was it? Don’t bother with bolted woad, at least not on cellulose fiber?

If it was just an experience, how much weight should I give it? I don’t feel like I can ignore it. “Chalk it up to experience” is a comforting saying, but I like to feel that I’ve learned something from my experiences, even if they aren’t a “lesson” per se. Will bolted woad always give disappointing color? Is there more to know about second year woad? Undoubtedly, yes. Is woad just weird with silk? Did the vinegar solution make the silk unhappy for some reason unrelated to woad?

One thing’s for sure, I always seem to find more questions than answers.

Japanese Indigo Update

So, my attempts to germinate my own Japanese indigo seeds were futile. I kept scrutinizing the tiny little green things that were growing, but none of them seemed quite right. Not pink or plump enough. Eventually I gave up.

Jeff Silberman and Carolyn Wetzel to the rescue! Jeff has been growing Japanese indigo for several years as part of a sustainability project at FIT. Carolyn was driving down to Pennsylvania to teach a lace-making class. Wearing her New England Flax and Linen Study Group hat, she was also dropping off a custom-made flax brake for Jeff made by her neighbor. Gotta love the incredible skills and social networks of the Western MA hilltowns! On her return trip, Carolyn picked up some seedlings for me and dropped them off at our apartment.

At first I was puzzled and a bit dismayed. Dozens of teensy seedlings were crammed tightly together.

I conferred with Jeff. He said that they were very hardy and resilient, and could stand quite a bit of disruption. I used a plastic knife to separate a few at a time.

On June 15th I transplanted them into small pots. I regretted the violence done to the roots. I was literally tugging teensy roots apart with my hands. But after my over-crowded flax experience, I figured it was better to give them room to grow.

I was worried that they would all die of shock. The next morning, though, they looked fine. Here they are on June 16th:

Behind our apartment there is quite a bit of squirrel action. They run amok and tend to knock things over and dig things up, including the Japanese indigo seedlings. So, on June 19th I covered the seedlings with plastic covers in an attempt to protect them. Sammycat inspected and approved the set-up.

I also sprinkled red pepper flakes around the plants. The squirrels had been digging and we hoped that the capsaicin would dissuade them. All the plants got the same treatment (we also grow tomatillos, chili peppers, and a bunch of other plants). It mostly worked. This plant wasn’t so lucky:

Here’s a closer view of some of the other Japanese indigo plants:

I guess I didn’t do any further photo-documentation until they were ready to transplant into the garden bed. The bed I was planning to use had been occupied all spring by the second year woad plants that were going to seed. On July 4th the woad seeds were ripe. I harvested them and cleared the bed for a new crop.

Here are most of the transplanted Japanese indigo plants on July 7th:

Here’s a ground-level view:

There have been a lot of rabbits this year. This photo is from our school garden, but I’m including it because I didn’t manage to photograph the rabbit at Bramble Hill.

The very day that I transplanted the Japanese indigo seedlings, I arrived at the garden to find a rabbit sitting right in the midst of everything! Now, the bunny at the school garden was rightfully scared and hid under the platform.

Not so the bunny at the Bramble Hill Farm plot. Instead of running away like a small creature might normally do when a human comes along, it just shuffled over and settled down under the amsonia like it lived there or something. Cheeky rabbit.

So, I figured I needed to protect the seedlings from chewing. Here was my first effort on July 7th:It was enough to discourage the rabbits, thankfully, but I tightened things up on July 8th:

Eventually we had a hot spell, on top of a long dry spell. At first I left on the row covers thinking it would provide a bit of shade. But on July 18th I figured the time had come to uncover the plants and let them take their chances with the rabbits:

On July 18th the seedlings were looking great:

The rain barrel got low, so I had to deliver water via car, but on July 20th, despite the hot spell, they were thriving. Yesterday, July 22nd, we had heavy rain. The rain barrel is full again. I am optimistic about continued health and growth.

Transplanting Swamp Milkweed

So far this season I have been feeling deficient in my dye and fiber plant growing skills. Here’s a success story, at least thus far (knock on wood).

The swamp milkweed was not faring well in the dye and fiber plant garden at Bramble Hill Farm. As I have noted in earlier posts, that site is not a swamp. It is a dry, wind-swept, hilltop garden spot. I kept felt guilty that I could not successfully fend off the yellow aphids on the swamp milkweeds plants in that location. I finally decided that the plants were experiencing an overall undue level of stress which was making them vulnerable to attack. The responsible thing would be to move them to a wetter spot. So I did.

Here is what one of the plants looks like at Bramble Hill on April 21, 2019:

It was still dormant, so I figured it was OK to dig it up and move it. In the photo above you can see the fibrous tendrils that are still attached to the outer papery skin on a couple of the stalks. Below you can see the same plant but from a little higher up. This is what I sometimes think of as the “nothing to see here” vantage point. Mostly it’s the dandelion that stands out:

The resources I’ve consulted recommend moving milkweed plants either in the fall when the plants are dormant, or in the early spring. I have had good luck moving swamp milkweed before so I was pretty confident it would work. A. incarnata has a wide network of roots, but the plant doesn’t form colonies with long runners like common milkweed does, so it’s easier to be sure that you’ve dug up the whole root system.

Here is what the emerging shoots of another A. incarnata plant looked like on April 21st. They are the small buds with a pinkish-purplish tinge:

Here is the mucky site I was moving them to:

It is the designated mud-play area of our school garden at the Common School. A drainage culvert empties out underneath that wooden platform to the right of the photo, hence the additional water in that part of the garden. Since we have had such a rainy spring, it was still very puddly and wet at the end of April and early May.

Here’s what it looked like once I had dug over a “bed” next to the fence:

The black plastic was left over from our initial lawn-smothering process when we expanded that area of the garden in 2016.

Here is a plant emerging happily on May 10th:

And on May 26th:

As of yesterday, June 17th, the plants were lush and happy:

It has continued to be a wet and cool spring, which is suiting them just fine:

It remains to be seen if they will bloom this year. I have read that milkweed plants may forego flowering if they are stressed after transplanting. Whatever happens this summer, and in seasons to come, I hope they will be happier in their new watery home.