Madder Days 10-13

Day 10
Pigment-wise, today was exactly like day 9, involving siphoning, and adding more distilled water to the bucket. It looked pretty much exactly like the photos from day 9.

Dyeing the wool was more exciting, so I took some pictures of that process. Here's the wool coming out of the alum bath. I took it out still hot and steamy, using my new prongs.

then rinsed it in the sink before adding it to the dye bath.

Here's a picture of it going into the dye bath. it started absorbing the color right away.

And finally, here it is sitting in the dye bath. I left it over night.

Day 11
I took the wool out of the dye bath, squeezed the excess liquid out of it, and let it hang to dry a bit. The color was not very strong, which I attributed to the dye, since it had given most of its color to the pigment making process.


and so I poured the dye back into the beaker with the roots, to see if i could obtain a stronger dye again. Here's a picture of what it looked like when I first added the dye back into the beaker. I set it over heat to raise the temp back up to 40*C, and gave it a good stir.

Here's another photo of it a while later, once it had reached 40*C. Obviously the roots still have some color left in them!


Below is the wool sitting in the stronger dye bath. I left it again over night.

I also noticed that the first bucket full of water i siphoned off of the large bucket had some sediment in it, which had settled to the bottom. I poured off as much of the liquid as I could without losing the pigment at the bottom, and then poured in a bit of fresh distilled water and let it sit again, just like a mini batch of what was going on in the main bucket. It took significantly less time for the liquid in this batch to run clear, and so I was able to filter this small amount early. Here's a picture of the first little bit of madder pigment. It looks like paint here because it is still wet, but it still needs quite a bit of attention before it will actually be paint.

Day 12
Here's a photo of the outside of the main bucket. since it is translucent, you can see the color of the water, as well as how much pigment is settling at the bottom. It looks like about a liter of sediment at the bottom, and the water is still kind of an orange color here.


This is a picture I took after siphoning off the liquid. You can see the sediment at the bottom of the bucket very clearly, and the orange halo around the edge of the sediment is the small amount of water on top.


This one shows the outside of the bucket after siphoning. I siphoned nearly all of the liquid out of the bucket, leaving only 2 1/2 liters, about half of which looks like sediment.

Day 13
I siphoned most of the water out of the bucket last night, thinking that Mike had picked up more distilled water for me at the store yesterday - but he had forgotten about it. I wasn't able to add fresh distilled water until this morning.

Then I waited a little over 8 hours before siphoning it again. This time the water that was siphoned off of the bucket was close enough to clear (here it looks yellow & a little murky, but once the tiny amount of sediment that made it into the siphoning settles, the water was quite clear). So rather than add more distilled water to it, it's finally time to filter it and separate out the pigment!

Here you can see a little better how clear the water really was. You can see the sediment at the bottom of the bucket, and what looks like a shadow of a halo around the sediment. that shadow is the little bit of clear water still sitting on top of the sediment.

For easier handling, I poured the entire contents of the bucket into one of the beakers. It's looking very murky here because all of the sediment has mixed with the clear water.

Once again I've got a jar setup with a funnel, and one of the chemical filters. This time it's taking longer to get through the filter because it has quite a bit more pigment in it than my small trial batch did a couple of days ago. It is working great, though - only clear water is making it down into the jar, and the pigment is settling nicely into the filter!