Armchair Travelling and Dyeing

This morning I was looking at Facebook, and my cyberpal Jude mentioned some lovely cloth available in a BigCartel shop, like this, which I absolutely love but can't afford to treat myself to at the moment. One thought followed another and one click followed another, too. Our next door neighbours have a pretty tree in their front garden

which is currently strewing leaves across our lawn and drive.

I thought about using them to dye some silk of my own, and went to gather some up. I have habutai silk which has been washed ready for dyeing, thinking of an attack of the blues - or indigo dyeing. So I hunted and Googled for information, and decided to more or less follow India Flint's recipe and jumped right in. I took the silk to the garden and spread it out on the grass, then folded it in concertina pleats, layering in the leaves. I added it to a bowl of water and vinegar, and proceeded to cook it in the microwave. Unfortunately the microwave was feeling it's age and conked out after a while, so I had to think again. This time I put my precious bundle on a colander to steam it over a saucepan to steam it, which made me think I could kill two birds with one stone and so I gathered another couple of handfuls of eucalyptus leaves off the lawn and put them in the water to separate out the pigment.

The boiling and steaming is done, so my original piece of cloth is now soaking, together with another piece, in the coloured water, leaves still in place. I'll leave them there until tomorrow and then we'll see what effect this treatment has had. As you can see, the leaves have coloured the water, and the silk had also taken pigment from the leaves in situ. I risk losing the transferred colour, I suppose, in the steeping, but it's all an experiment anyway.

The good news at present that the microwave was just having a hissy-fit and is now working again - it must be 34+ years old and mechanical, and they just don't make them like that any more!

More rusting

I've been playing with the ferrous sulphate again. I've been dyeing an assortment of threads, cotton velvet, scrim and turban cotton.

 

I've also been experimenting with some of the fabrics I dyed last week, but pictures of those will come later.

 

I've been trying to find a good contrast to these rusty orange shades, and it'a interesting to see how poorly these hand-dyed fabrics, coloured with natural dyes, go with their commercial cousins. However,
Magie Relph sells plain cotton which is indigo dyed, so I invested in a metre of this and it goes really well. I think the colours are too subtle to capture with my photography in terms of what goes and what doesn't but I might try a photo shoot on a non-raining day to see if I can demonstrate what I mean regarding natural hand-dyed vs commercially printed fabrics. Meanwhile, the cloths are busy oxidising on the line prior to a dip in soda solution, and they can do this in the rain as well as the dry.

My son is intrigued by these fabrics. His comment was that they look dirty, used and worn. I told him that was intentional, which has given him food for thought. He can sort of see the point of this. I'll be curious to see what he thinks of what I make with them, in due course.

Ferrous Sulphate Dyeing

Yesterday, the urge to dye came upon me. This, in part, was due to the arrival of my order from ArtVanGo. Among the goodies was a bag of ferrous sulphate, looking for all the world like mouldy salt. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing. There was no time like the present, so I went for it.

 

Instructions come with the chemical, which can also be found here. I'd also seen a variation on the blog of Purple Missus. I did a sort of hybrid method by adding the strong tea brew to the caustic soda solution. I found this knocked back the bright colour created by the iron rust, creating a muddier greying the longer the fabric was exposed. My first reaction was that this had spoiled the effect, but now the cloth is dry and pressed, I think the effect is of extreme ageing which certainly has its place in my palette. I dyed another length of calico with no tea/tannin added and this was much brighter by the time it dried - it's the fabric at the top of the picture. As in indigo dyeing, what you fish out of the pot is not what you eventually get.....

So here's some cloth to add to my collection, and I'll have to think about what I'm going to do with this technique to move it on. It would be interesting to try some rust transfer dyeing over this base cloth to create greater variation, and to consider tie dye techniques and using the tea to create pattern on the surface by dipping, dribbling or shibori methods. Meanwhile, I have these pieces to play with.