Local Color Dyes

March 21, 2012August 10, 2016

Where are the books now?

My blank books and bookmarks are now available for sale at two fine establishments, Shelburne Arts Co-op in Shelburne Falls, MA, and Sawmill River Arts by the Montague Bookmill in Montague.

In other news, I have been making plans for flax growing experiments this spring. Usually I don’t plant flax until mid-April or even early May, but spring has come very early this year. I have grand aspirations this year, and will be growing several varieties: a non-specified fiber flax variety from Richters, Evelin from Richters, Marilyn from the Hermitage, and a tiny quantity of Regina from Sand Mountain Herbs. Stay tuned for more updates about flax.

March 19, 2012December 17, 2023

Madder Exhaust with Bleached Cotton

I decided to let the twice-mordanted bleached 10/2 cotton skeins air out until the vinegar smell was extremely faint, but not the full 4 to 7 days that Liles recommends. They dried from Thursday morning until Saturday morning, then I used a fixing solution. I used half an ounce of calcium carbonate, which suspends in the water more than dissolves, really. I didn’t use dung. I stirred it up with very hot water, added the dry skeins, put the pot on the stove, and heated up to about 150 degrees, stirring periodically, for 30 minutes.

Here are the extremely white skeins in the milky white fixing solution:

It almost looks like I’ve dyed the skeins white. After 30 minutes, I pulled out the skeins and rinsed them twice, then I had to go to work so I left them to soak in plain water. In the evening I rinsed them twice again.

As it turned out, the fine, moldy-looking film which had been growing on the surface of the madder dyebath got displaced by increasingly large bubbles from fermentation (I assume–not sure about the microbiology here). The dyebath was a bit slimy but none the worse for wear, and it didn’t even smell too bad.

I know I said that I wasn’t going to try anything new this time around except for the scouring and mordanting steps, but I did try two other things. Liles suggests soaking the goods in the dyebath for at least half an hour before applying any heat, and then heating for at least 2 hours. He writes that alizarin, the main red-producing dyestuff in madder roots, is not very soluble in cold water, and just a little more so in hot water. Starting out cold, raising the temperature slowly, and heating for a prolonged period of time (Liles recommends up to 3 hours for cotton) allows the fiber to take up the alizarin as it slowly dissolves. I did soak the bleached cotton skeins before heating. I soaked the first two for 30 minutes, and the third for about 6 hours. Each has soaked overnight in the dyebath before drying and then rinsing. I will post a photo when they are all done.

March 15, 2012August 10, 2016

I Do Detect the Smell of Acetic Acid

I have mordanted my bleached 10/2 cotton skeins a second time with aluminum acetate, which involved heating at 100 for an hour (it actually got up to 150 at one point, oops), cooling overnight in the mordant bath, and hanging outside to dry this morning. This afternoon they are not yet dry, but they do have a strong vinegar-like smell which I think must be the acetic acid Liles mentioned. So I gather I ought to wait until that smell dissipates, which could be several days, before I dye the yarn. Meanwhile, my madder bath is starting to get moldy. I have a pretty high tolerance for decomposition and stinky things, but in a few more days it will be yucky. What to do?

March 14, 2012December 17, 2023

Madder Dyed Yarns

After a leisurely process of heating, soaking, and delayed rinse, the first four skeins of madder-dyed yarns are done. Here they are outside today, a bright and sunny day.

I’ve done four dyebaths so far. The photo above shows successive dyebaths moving from right to left. The yarn on the cone is from the first dyebath. The yarns in the first three dyebaths were 20/2 linen and the fourth was 22/2 cottolin. The linen yarns were mordanted with alum acetate, and the cottolin was mordanted with alum acetate plus tannin. The weight of goods in each dyebath was about 2 ounces.

For the last couple exhaust baths I am preparing 10/2 cotton (bleached) because that’s what I have on hand at the moment. After some disappointing results with my last two umbilicate dyebaths, and out of a general desire to achieve greater depth and brightness of colors on cellulose fibers, I am going to try some new procedures. I’m especially frustrated with cotton at the moment, and for help I am turning to Jim Liles’ book The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing: Traditional Recipes for Modern Use. In his instructions for scouring cotton, Liles writes, “… simmer or boil for an absolute minimum of 2 hours. Three or 4 hours is better in some cases, and in the old days cotton was sometimes scoured at the boil for 8 hours. Cotton is full of wax, pectic substances, and oil, all of which must be removed.” This is much longer than I’ve ever scoured before.

So, I boiled the skeins for two hours with ~~anionic~~ cationic scour 12/17/2023 Correction! (from Earthues) and soda ash. Then I rinsed them three times, and mordanted with alum acetate at 5% weight of the goods at 100 degrees for one hour, let the yarns steep in the mordant for a couple days, dried them, and am now re-mordanting in the same mordant bath. This procedure is a combination of my usual cellulose treatments (based on recommendations from Earthues) and recommendations from Jim Liles.

Double-mordanting with a period of drying in between is a new experiment for me. Liles gives instructions for making your own aluminum acetate, and writes that you should wait until the acetic acid smell has dissipated before proceeding with dyeing. Since I am using alum acetate that I did not have to make myself, I didn’t detect any acetic acid smell after mordanting the first time, so I went ahead with the second mordant bath after just drying the skeins for a day.

Next will come the “fixing solution” Liles recommends. To remove unbonded mordant, he recommends soaking with a solution of calcium carbonate or sodium phosphate for 30 minutes, then rinsing with water. I’m not sure from the book whether I can just use calcium carbonate, or whether it has to be soaked with cattle or sheep dung. It seems to me that if I have the calcium carbonate, I don’t need the dung (since that seems to be a source of sodium and calcium phosphate), but maybe it helps.

Since I am already pretty far along with this madder project, I’m not planning to make any changes to my usual dyeing, drying, or rinsing steps with the last exhaust baths this time around.

However, for my next madder project I will try one of Liles’ recipes for madder red. Reading through his recipes has been very eye-opening and I am fascinated by, and kind of surprised by, many of the things he writes about. For example, instead of just rinsing the madder-dyed goods, he describes a process where the dyed material is simmered or boiled with soap. This is supposed to make the color brighter and more clear. I watch the temperature very carefully while the roots are extracting and the yarn is in the dyebath to make sure it *doesn’t* boil or even simmer. It never occurred to me that high heat later in the process could be beneficial. Also, he writes that the dyebath ought to be acidic when dyeing cotton or linen with madder. Oops. Did you see my pH comments in the last post? Clearly I had the wrong idea about what that calcium carbonate was for. In fact, he writes that making the dyebath alkaline will produce a bluish-purple. Well, I didn’t get anything like purple this time with my alkaline dyebath, but maybe I can…. So many things to try.

Here’s the madder-dyed linen yarn getting woven into cloth with black 20/2 cotton tabby weft.

This shot is from underneath the breastbeam to show the cloth winding onto the cloth beam. I really like these colors together. The blue-green is woad overdyed with weld.

March 4, 2012December 17, 2023

Madder and Flavoparmelia Dyebaths

After three extractions and a lot of soaking in between, my madder and lichen baths are ready to go. I’m sticking with Flavoparmelia caperata for the ID on the bark-growing foliose lichen, though I’m sure I could be wrong.

For each dyebath, I combined all three extractions. Next for some tinkering.

Here are the color and pH of the madder bath before I did anything to it. Brown.

I would call that pH6 which is acidic, not where I want it to be to develop good reds. So, first I added more calcium carbonate (there was already one teaspoon in the roots as I extracted them). This did not produce much of a pH shift (see below). I’d still call that 6, though I don’t know what’s up with that bottom square. It’s not supposed to be so orange. Happily, the color darkened and shifted a little from brown to red.

I wanted to get the pH up a little, so I added 1/2 teaspoon dissolved soda ash at first, which got it up to pH 8 (photo on the left below). The dyepot contains about 2 gallons of liquid. I did not weigh my modifiers or figure out the percent on the weight of the dyestuff this time around (I extracted 8 ounces of roots). After another half teaspoon of dissolved soda ash, the pH was 9, which I was happy with (photo on right).

Since I’m dyeing linen, I’m not worried about making it too alkaline. I introduced a 2 ounce skein of 20/2 linen half bleach, which I had mordanted with alum acetate back in December, and re-mordanted yesterday for good measure. After 30 minutes heating, the color was promising:

Here is what it looked like once I got up to my target, and maximum, temperature of 160 degrees (over 160 you’ll get brown rather than red tones):

I am very satisfied with this so far. My quest to create rich color on linen yarns seems to be advancing, though I shouldn’t speak too soon. The color is always lighter once it is dried and rinsed. I held the temp between 150 and 160 for an hour (and actually had to shut off the heat for a while to keep it from getting too hot). Next, the skein will sit and soak all day and overnight in the dyebath, and then it’ll drip dry before I rinse it. I find that delaying the rinse helps with fastness. So, that’s the status of the madder bath. As the week progresses, I expect to re-use the bath repeatedly and get a lot of pink, salmon, apricot, and so on until it’s exhausted.

The Flavoparmelia experiment is less exciting, but at least now I know not to bother with it again, so that’s useful information anyway. Here’s the initial color of the dyebath with all three extractions combined (I started with 5.4 ounces of lichens including a lot of bark).

The pH was a bit weird. I didn’t take a photo (by now you’re probably tired of photos of pH strips). It looked like 6 at first, but as the liquid wicked up it shifted to 5. The initial color of the skein was light and not promising.

Just for the heck of it I decided to see if the color was pH sensitive (since I already had the soda ash out anyway…). I put some of the hot dyebath liquid in a jar and added 1/4 teaspoon of soda ash. It darkened, so I decided to add this solution to the dyebath (I took out the skein first). Since this dyebath contains less liquid than the madder pot, about one gallon rather than two, even such a little soda ash had a noticeable effect on the pH, which went up to 8.

OK, I guess there isn’t a big difference between these two photos. On the left is the yarn halfway through heating it, and on the right is how it looks after sitting and soaking for eight hours. I do not plan to exhaust this bath.

March 2, 2012December 17, 2023

New Umbilicate Vats

Last Friday (February 24th) I set up three new umbilicate lichen vats with the fallen lichens I collected on February 1st and 6th. I had stored them in two different bags. The material in one bag was damp, and the other dry and crispy. You’re supposed to dry them first, but I proceeded with the damp ones and hope it works out.

Several of the pieces were enormous. If they grow half a millimeter a year, this six inch piece must have taken over 300 years to reach this size!

This piece, too, must be ancient.

As you can imagine, handling these things inspires awe.

I crumbled up the dry ones, tore the damp ones into small pieces, and combined them. I had 12 cups all together, though “cups” is sort of relative because you can compact them, and then they spring back up again. The total weight was 12 ounces. I divided the lichen pieces between three jars, with 4 ounces in each.

With the exception of using the damp lichen, I followed the directions in Casselman’s Lichen Dyes. I also found and re-read her article “Color Magic from Lichen Dyebaths” in Shuttle, Spindle, and Dyepot from Spring 1986 (vol. 17 #2), which I forgot to mention in my posts before.

She says to choose a jar that can accommodate twice the volume of the lichens. You need a lot of headroom in the jars to allow the lichens to expand when they get wet, and to make sure there is enough oxygen in the vat. I put the crumbled up lichen in the jars, and added equal amounts of ammonia and water (2 cups of each). The ammonia solution was pH 10.

Here are the jars.

You can see that the bubbles on the surface are clear (well, a very light color).

After a week of stirring up the soaking lichens each day to incorporate oxygen, the color is developing nicely. Here’s the spoon I’ve been using, plus some of the liquid which has dribbled off.

Here are the jars after a vigorous shake this morning. Note the darker, more reddish-colored bubbles. I have to admit that I have not been stirring as many times a day as Casselman recommends, but things seem to be moving along OK.

It takes at least 16 weeks for an ammonia vat to develop and “ferment” properly. I will continue to incorporate oxygen regularly, which Casselman says is necessary to allow the orcinol to convert to orcein. So, don’t hold your breath as I probably won’t post about these vats again until June.

February 29, 2012December 17, 2023

February 29th, 2012

The Leap Day of the Leap Year

Today it is snowing. A much more typical wintry day than February 1st. Here’s what I have been doing so far today, fiber-wise:

I wove a section on my new warp, threaded once again with Young Lovers Knot, for a new batch of journals. Today I wove the section in the photo below. The blue is 22/2 cottolin dyed with woad and weld, and the tabby weft is teal 20/2 cotton, commercially dyed. When I first dyed the cottolin I was disappointed not to get a better green, but with the brighter colored tabby background it looks very nice anyway.

I changed the treadling for the sections where I’m using 20/2 linen or 22/2 cottolin because no matter what I do, I can’t beat it square with these yarns. With 10/2 cotton or 10/2 tencel it’s not a problem. Linen is just less inclined to submit to compression. It’s one of the things I love about linen, it has a mind of its own. And really, it’s not meant for overshot pattern weft, so who can blame it? To accommodate the linen, I shortened the square (or table) by two picks.

I wet-spun spun some bleached flax top (from Louet, not my own). It’s tow (short fibers). I did about half this bobbin today. My legs got wet, but it went with the snowy theme outdoors, so I didn’t really mind.

I was originally planning to spin a second bobbin and ply them, but I think I will leave it as singles and take out some of the extra twist when I wind it onto bobbins for weaving. My new plan is to spin the other half dry and then weave samples with them (using them for weft) to see if there is a noticeable difference between wet and dry spun tow.

I did the second extraction on two new dyebaths that I started over the weekend. One is madder (8 oz. roots bought from Aurora Silk a few years ago). The other is the Flavoparmelia lichens I collected this winter, plus the bark they were growing on. Since it is snowing, I heated these indoors today. Fortunately, they both smell amazing. Too bad you can’t smell them. The lichen smells like hot piney woods in the summer or a toasty fire in a cabin in the woods. The madder smells fruity, like red wine or blackberries getting boiled for jelly.

I plan to extract each one more time, then combine the extractions for stronger color. With the combined extractions, I am hoping to get a respectably rich color from the first madder bath, at least. The Flavoparmelia is an experiment, but I figure I’ll give it every opportunity to yield a strong color, if it can.

I am sticking with cellulose yarns for the time being, which are proving to be tricky. The colors are coming out lighter than I expect each time, with the exception of the CRAZY bright weld earlier in the fall/winter. Here’s how it’s looking woven up. These two photos show 20/2 linen half-bleach pattern weft with black 20/2 cotton tabby (on the black warp).

These two show the same weld-dyed yarn with a light blue 20/2 cotton tabby weft. It’s a very woady blue, but it’s commercial. (In these sections I had not yet shortened the square, hence it is rectangular.)

Last but not least, I have stirred up my new umbilicate lichen vats to incorporate oxygen. I will post about that separately.

It’s been great to have an extra day to work on all these projects. We should have a leap day every year.

February 25, 2012December 17, 2023

Textile Jigsaw Puzzle

What do weavers and dyers do when they are not weaving and dyeing? For one thing, textile-related puzzles! Matthew and I just finished this incredible puzzle.

Sorry, the overview of the whole puzzle is a bit blurry, but here are some details.

The puzzle is published by Pomegranate,1000 pieces, and very complicated. It took us quite a long time, but it was fun and it’s beautiful.

According to the description on the box, the image shows a portion of an offering cloth from the late 1700s found on the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, made from handspun wool. The description specifically says that it probably was not a woman’s manta (shawl), because of its size. It is in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

On the website of the National Museum of the American Indian, this same cloth is catalogued as a woman’s manta, 120x120x110 cm, made of cotton and camelid fiber yarns (meaning alpaca or llama). The site where it was found is described as the Temple of the Sun or Temple of the Virgins of the Sun on La Isla de la Luna, or Island of the Moon. I’m not sure which source is more accurate (I assume the museum catalogue). By the way, check out the “materials” list in the “object specifics” part of the collection search function. A list after my own heart.

The cloth features horizontal rows of abstract patterns (reminiscent of flags and bunting) alternating with fields of representational images including amazing animals like deer (or maybe alpaca or llamas), ducks, eagles, parrots and other birds, monkeys, people, and mer-creatures (one looks like it’s playing a guitar and is half-seal or perhaps half-manatee). There are lots of things which look like stacked up bowls, which we came to refer to as “ice cream sundaes,” and reminded us of those beautifully presented piles of fruit and other offerings at Buddhist temples. The overall feeling is a celebratory sense of teeming life and energy and abundance.

As a dyer, I was very interested in the colors. Shades of red and maroon dominate, with gold, yellow, white, purplish brown, and several shades of blue, of course all dyed with natural dyes. It was hard to tell how many colors had been used in the original cloth. The same shade of maroon looked different depending on whether it was surrounded by bright red or gold… or were they really two different shades of maroon? Tricky.

This is a color theory phenomenon called simultaneous contrast. The hue (color), chroma (intensity), and value (degree of light/white or dark/black) of a color look different depending on one color’s relationship to another. If you search for this on line you can find some great examples. I liked the examples on David Brigg’s website (though to view the videos you need Flash and some other plug-ins).

February 22, 2012December 17, 2023

What’s a Lichen?

What is a lichen, anyway? A lichen is a symbiotic organism composed of a fungus and another organism that can photosynthesize. Fungi do not photosynthesize, that is, they do not make their own food from sunlight (and carbon dioxide and water) using chlorophyll. They are heterotrophic, meaning they get their nutrition from outside themselves. Fungi are different from plants and have their own taxonomic kingdom. The photosynthesizing organisms in lichens are different kinds of algae, cyanobacteria, or sometimes both. The photosynthesizing part of a lichen is called the “photobiont” (short for photosynthetic symbiont). 12/17/2023 Edited to add: Check out my blog post from 2016 with exciting updated info about lichens!)

The photobiont makes sugars and other carbohydrates through photosynthesis, and allows some of these nutrients to be absorbed by the fungus. In return, the fungus provides structure and stability, some protection from sunlight, and as much consistent moisture as the habitat can provide, by conducting water through its cell walls. The fungus combined with its photobiont grows into a particular shape or structure. By itself, with identical genetic information, the fungus would not grow into this shape. The algae and cyanobacteria would not be able to colonize rocks or bark or other places that lichens grow without the fungi.

Lichens are amazingly complex, and scientists still don’t know all the details about exactly how they work. They come in a huge range of colors, textures, shapes, and sizes, and grow on lots of different surfaces (or substrates) in a very wide range of habitats. Some lichens are able to fix atmospheric nitrogen, and play a role in creating conditions to support plant life. Lichens readily accumulate minerals, including toxic compounds, are thus very susceptible to pollution. They grow very slowly. Foliose lichens (named for their leaf-like structure) like my Flavoparmelia caperata grow an average of .4-.5 mm a year. Umbilicates are also a type of foliose lichen with extra-big “leaves.” Umbilicate lichens form new cells at the center, which is why it doesn’t kill the lichen to tear off small pieces from the outside edge.

The acids and other compounds that make lichens useful for dyers serve a range of functions in the lichens themselves. Some are pigments that filter out certain wavelengths of light, some have antibiotic properties that inhibit other organisms that might compete with the slow-growing lichens, some make them taste bad so herbivores won’t eat them….

OK, I could go on and on, but if you’re interested you can read more on your own. Again, here are my two trusty references:

Lichen Dyes: The New Source Book by Karen Diadick Casselman. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001.

Lichens of North America by Irwin M. Brodo, Sylvia Duran Sharnoff, and Stephen Sharnoff. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. This is THE book. In addition to being an incredible and beautiful reference, its bulk makes it useful as a book-binding press, and occasionally to hold up the printer:

February 22, 2012December 17, 2023

A Tale of Lichen and Weird Winter Weather (Part Six)

This part of the story actually happens before the lye testing in Part Five, but to me it is the climax of the whole story, so I saved it until the end.

As the ground stayed bare this winter, I continued to see lots more (probably) Flavoparmelia caperata lying on the ground, and other lichens. It made me wonder how much usually gets buried under the snow. Does it usually get crushed and decompose? If it had been a regular snowy winter, I’d never even know it was there. Which leads me to….

Part Six: Non-Snowy Woods on the First of February

The first of February was glorious and warm and sunny. To celebrate the day, I went for a longer walk than usual. A hike. There was not a patch of snow on the ground anywhere, only occasional ice. Just as I was thinking about how happy I was that this non-snowy winter enabled me to learn more about lichens, I noticed a lot of umbilicates growing on a rock face that I’d never really noticed before. I scrabbled over to check at the base of the rocks for any fallen pieces. There was an incredible, astonishing abundance! I felt like I was in a fairy tale; I’d been thinking about how awesome lichens are, and then ta-da there were tons of them. Magic. And not just any lichens, the awesomest ones.

I filled both my pockets with loose pieces from the ground, but there was way more than my pockets could hold. A blissful day and a blissful foraging treat.

Here are some photos. Some pieces were right on the ground, and some were hidden under the leaves. The underside of these umbilicates is velvety and black. The top is greenish, olive, or brownish. They are sometimes called “rock tripe,” hence the labels on the photos (if you hover over or click on an image it tells you the title of the photo).

I went back to the same spot on February 6th (another glorious day) with a gallon sized zip lock bag, and filled that also.

The discovery of this abundance made me wonder whether this much falls off every winter, or whether more pieces than usual broke off this year because of the weird (comparatively warm and dry) weather. Would I find this much again another winter? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. I think this weird winter was special.