Madder Day 8 & 9

Day 8
Day 8 consisted of doing absolutely nothing with my madder solution. It just sat, undisturbed in the bucket all day, to allow the pigment to settle down to the bottom of the bucket.

Day 9
Today was kind of exciting madder-wise. First, a look at the tools I used today - more distilled water, a siphon & plastic tubing:

Here's a photo of the madder solution before I got started. The pigment has visibly started to settle, and the very top bit of water seems a little more translucent than the lower portion of the bucket, though it's all pretty dark at this point.

this is the siphon I got at the home brew shop. bet they didn't imagine I'd be using it for pigment washing!

I siphoned off half of the liquid (5 liters), careful not to let the siphon touch the bottom of the bucket. the last thing I want to do is disturb the precious pigment settling at the bottom.

and here's the bucket on the floor, containing the 5 liters of madder dye that i siphoned off. stay tuned - it's going to be re-used!

here's a shot of the 5 liters of dye left in the big bucket.

and now to add 5 liters of fresh water to the bucket. the goal is to dilute the dye that is still in the big bucket, and wash it out before filtering the pigment out. I've got at least a couple more days of doing this before I can proceed with the filtering. my bucket of madder solution needs to sit another 24 hours before I can siphon again. Then I can siphon it once every 8 hours if I want to. I need to keep siphoning until the water I'm siphoning off runs clear.

Here's my madder side project. I thought it would be a tragic waste to just dump the madder dye I siphoned off today - so I'm using it to dye a skein of wool. (good thing I keep wool on hand for occasions like this!) :)

First, a cleaning bath for the wool. I let it sit in a hot soapy bath in the sink for half an hour. Now knowing what I know about felting, I was careful not to handle the wool too much while it was sitting in the hot soapy water.

Here's my alum again - and this is what I normally use it for. It's used as a mordant for the wool, to help the dye adhere to the fiber better. and here is where math has finally actually come into play during this madder experiment. I had to weigh the wool (before I wet it down), and then use alum at 20% of the weight of the wool. The wool was 3.65 ounces, and so I used approx .73 ounces of alum. (or as you may remember, my scale does the nearest .05 of an ounce - so I measured out .70 of alum, and then added tiny amounts until it barely bounced up to .75, which I am sure is close enough for my purposes).

The alum is added to a glass of boiling water, which is then added to a pot of warm water. The clean wool is added, and then the temp is brought up to 200*F and kept there for an hour. The photo below shows my wool just after it was added to the alum solution. I have about 10 minutes left, then I'll let it cool just until it's cool enough to handle, and then I'll rinse it with hot water. Since my siphoned madder dye is currently at room temp (and I'm not intending to heat it), I'd like the wool to be as warm as possible when I add it. I'll post photos of the actual wool dyeing process with tomorrow's madder update!