I also used my favorite fiber for this project - it's a wool/alpaca blend. I've used it twice now, and both times it's taken the dye very well. I had also read that the boiled (gasp) madder dye makes the best orange with a tin mordant - and so, as mentioned in my last post, I used a tin mordant for this fiber. I have since bottled my tin mordant and am keeping it in the fridge for next time. I've read that I can keep it indefinitely and just re-charge it with 3/4 of the amount of tin next time I want to use it. It makes things simpler for me (especially now that I have a dedicated dye mini-fridge for my studio), and it keeps my tin out of the water system or my back yard soil, since I'm not dumping it. As it turns out, it is also a fairly economical mordant, as it requires only a very small amount added to the water. I only needed 0.05oz to the water to mordant the fiber for this project.
above is the madder dye simmering (gasp) with my wool/alpaca fiber. I simmered it for a good hour before letting it cool in the pot over night.
I am having a real problem getting a good photo of the color of the finished wool. It is in fact more orange than it shows in this picture. It is indeed a bit earthy, but it is nowhere near as tan/brown as it seems in this photo. It is a definite orange. I have a feeling that if I had used fresh madder and simmered it from that - it would have been a quite intense, bright orange. Probably still a bit earthy, but very intense for an earthy orange would be my guess - and exactly what I had read about.Weld
After letting my weld soak over night in distilled water, I boiled it for an hour, and then filtered it. I wanted to use my cotton dish towels to filter it, as I had done with the madder - but the one I was looking for had mysteriously gone missing. (I strongly suspect that Mike has something to do with that - and if I find it in a strange place, I'm sure it will turn into a Mike Story). But alas, I couldn't find it, and so I used a coffee filter instead. Which I hated. coffee filters are slow, clog too easy, and the paper becomes pretty weak when it's wet. I found them to be more annoying than anything else.
Here's the coffee filter catching some of the weld leaves and stems. I found it to be such a slow process with the coffee filter that I tried to keep most of the leaves and stems out of the filter, and instead scooped them up (with gloved hands, of course) and squeezed them over the filter to save time. (if you know me, you know how impatient I can be at times) ;)
Here's a shot where you can see the strained liquid below. It looked fairly orange at this point - a lot like tea.
See that dark spot above?? THAT is a big patch of sediment from the weld that made it through my stupid coffee filter. I had to filter the dye three times to get it all out. I still think my cotton towel would have done a better (and certainly faster) job of catching a lot of this. I probably could have gotten away with straining it once through the towel, and then once through filters to achieve a nice clear dye.
I switched to chemical filter papers for the second and third filtering. I went through several of them - but they didn't clog as easy, and strained quite a bit faster than the coffee filters. They're also significantly stronger when wet than the coffee filters are, and don't tear and break so easy. I do like them, and am researching my options for getting some bigger ones. My science friend Tam pointed me to Fisher Scientific, which has a rather large and overwhelming selection of them. I'm fairly sure that an inexpensive, fast flow variety will suit my needs - but even within that category there are a lot of options. (even more options if you ignore the "inexpensive" bit).I wish I had remembered to take a photo of the dye once I finally filtered all of the muck out of it. It was a nice, clear, golden orange color. I still have half of the weld left, and will try to remember to take a photo of that stage next time I work with it.
The photo below shows what it looked like right after I added the calcium carbonate (chalk). I had read about dyers using a bit of chalk at the end of the heating phase, to "bloom" the color - and it was a real blast to see it for myself! part science, part art - I got to watch it change within seconds from a transparent orange tea-color to a pretty opaque lemon yellow color. Sure the photo below looks a lot like buttermilk - but I assure you it was a lemon yellow color. (stupid photography).
This next photo may look reminiscent of an over sized, oddly colored glass of beer - but it's a photo of the weld after I added the alum solution. It foamed up like mad - I'm probably lucky it didn't spill over. My instructions for the madder project called for letting it sit at this phase for several days, giving it a quick stir every now and then, until it stops foaming - so that's exactly what I'm going to do with the weld too.
I let it sit over night, and this is what I woke up to the next morning. It had settled pretty well at the bottom, and some of the foam had disappeared - although there was still quite a bit of it. I gave it another stir (after which it looked pretty much like the last photo again, with somewhat less foam). Since then, the foam has mostly gone away, and there is now just a little foamy film on top. I'm going to let it sit for at least another day - maybe two. Then I can start rinsing it.
For this weld project, I had to guess at the amounts of chalk and alum to add, as I couldn't find anything on the subject to use as a guide. I couldn't even find what proportion they should be in compared to one another. In the end, I used my madder project as a guide. It had called for close to two and a half ounces of each alum and potash. In this case I was using chalk instead of potash (and my new acquaintance, Louis, helped to clarify the differences he's noticed between using chalk, potash, and soda ash - Thanks Louis!). I used 2 ounces of each alum and chalk for this batch of weld. Louis has since suggested reducing the amount of each the alum and the chalk next time, and using a different proportion - with more chalk than alum. I am, of course, anxious to start a second batch to compare the difference. Louis also noted that you can obtain a less opaque pigment with weld by using either potash or soda ash instead of chalk, but that the color doesn't come out quite as nice. That came as no surprise to me, since dyers routinely add chalk to weld dye to get the best yellow. (A dyer would have no other motivation to do this, except to adjust the color).
...in fact I read an interesting anecdote posted by a dyer while I was looking for a weld pigment recipe. She had described her dyeing process as adding both a small amount of chalk to bloom the color, as well as the alum mordant straight into the weld dye. Then she noted that she had to keep stirring her dye pot continually, because the color kept settling out. She didn't seem to find this odd for a dye (as in fact it is the definition of a pigment rather than a dye if it is settling out) - and from her posting, it sounded like she thought this was a normal experience. I couldn't help thinking that after all of this time trying to find a pigment recipe - here was this woman getting one by complete accident and not even recognizing what she had discovered. I had to laugh at myself - and then I quit the research and got my own butt into the kitchen to experiment. If she could do it by accident, I could surly do it on purpose. (I didn't attempt to contact her, but if a fellow dyer should happen to find this posting and wonder about it - the solution to that problem would be to mordant the fiber separately before adding it to the dye pot)
No comments:
Post a Comment