Dye – Page 5 – Fiber Musings

Red Handed!

On 24 Aug, 2013

I spent a fun day digging and preparing a madder dye vat that left me red handed. Yeah, I didn’t think about gloves.

We decided to be very methodical about this, instead of my usual slash dash way, in order to achieve a good clear red.

I put 454 grams (1 pound) of wool/silk yarn to soak in 70 grams of aluminum sulfate and 28 grams of grocery store cream of tartar. (I didn’t have any potassium bitartarte on hand so I had to make do with what I could.)

We set about to peel the roots before chopping it up for the dye bath. The bucket you see below is our wash bucket with root scrapings. I took the bucket home to play with it and see what colors I can get out of it. Dregs, if you will.

Stay tuned!

madder bath

P.S. We found that fresh madder roots are easy to peel. You peel it as you would peel ginger with a spoon. You end with just the skin taken off with little to no waste. That is, if you don’t count the skin, which has a lot of dye material too. Word is that the skin contains more of the yellows and browns, which I didn’t want.

Itajimi Shibori

By Ann

On 5 Jun, 2013

In Dye

Itajimi (also Itajime) shibori scarf from Doshi‘s workshop at CNCH.

For this shibori technique, you fold your fabric into shapes and then clamp wood blocks onto the folded fabric as resist. In my case, I folded my silk scarf into fourths lengthwise before folding them into isosceles triangles. I used a rectangular block that bisected the triangle from the base to the vertex angle.

Doshi had an extra concentrated acid based dye bath going. It only took 5 minutes in the dye bath to get this beautiful indigo-like color. A quick cold water rinse and then we hung them out of the 5th story hotel window in the High Sierras for a few minutes and we had a ready to wear scarf!

Fun and inspiring workshop. I can’t wait to play with this technique some more.

Peaches

By Ann

On 1 Sep, 2012

In Dye

Madder Samples

I measured the dried fiber and it was about 14.5 oz. In theory, I used about 7% WOF, which should have yielded a medium dark color. I would classify this as medium light.

After simmering the wool for a few hours in madder, I left it to cool for several days in approximately 70-75F days. I had hoped that it would exhaust a bit more of the color, but no luck. I tossed in a small skein of 8/2 cotton (pre-mordanted with alumininum acetate) and a silk hankerchief (pre-mordanted with alum) during the last hour of the simmer.

Random thoughts of a fiber enthusiast - mostly fiber related, sometimes coherent

Category: Dye Page 5 of 14

Red Handed!

Itajimi Shibori

Peaches