Natural Dyeing

Ooh! I'm excited to finally have the time to experiment with fiber arts in the realm of my senior project. Natural dyeing was one of my top favorite topics in the fiber arts class I took in spring 2012, among the wool processing, spinning, and knitting that I fell deeply in love with.

I had to reserve this experiment until after I'd finished pruning the pear tree behind Simpson, so I could gather bark and twigs that otherwise will get composted. There is also a box of dried foliage that I collected on impulse last fall, even before I knew that I was going to do my senior project on everything-about-pears.

Potential colors from pear leaves (top four color blocks) and pear bark (bottom four blocks).

Most people have probably used acid-wash dyes like Kool-Aid or Rit to make tie-dyed shirts, which usually produce reliable, dependable colors. Natural dyes behave quite differently and requires an attitude that welcomes or  tolerates unpredictability. Variations in which part of the plants you use at what time of the year and even the mineral content of your water can vary the results.

Depending on the dyestuff being used, fiber will require some pre-treatment to open up the fiber molecules to accept and hold onto color. Liquid solutions of metallic salts, known as mordants, are a solution of metallic salts like ferrous oxide (iron), copper sulfate, or alum.

Three skeins of yarn, three different mordants to prepare them for the dyebath! I actually ended up using only the untreated wool and the alum-mordanted wool.

The Wild Color book gave instructions to cold soak enough bark to equal half the weight of the amount of wool used (0.5: 1), or an equal weight of foliage to wool (1:1). The author also mentioned that due to the presence of tannins in the bark, I should be careful about how much heat I use to extract the dye for fear or creating an acidic vat that might felt my yarn. I thought, okay, no problem!

Alchemy -transforming one thing into another! Notice how the alum mordant (on the far left) produces no color change in the fiber, while the ferrous oxide characteristically turned the yarn a rusty color and the copper sulfate.  

I had originally hoped to make a strong enough dyebath to submerge four differently treated skeins of wool yarn in to see how the mordants would affect the colors... unfortunately, nothing seemed to come out as I had hoped, and my camera died on me so I didn't catch any pictures of the dye vats.  

Alum mordanted wool on the left, untreated wool on the right. 

I had  to make some compromises. I weighed each skein of yarn, and whittled enough bark for the given dyestuff to wool ratio, but the color of the dye was dark and tea colored (tannins anybody?) and gave a surprising weak take after several days of cold soaking and being simmered on very low heat. Almost no color! Instead of four skeins of yarn, I cut back to just the untreated natural yarn and the alum-mordanted yarn.

Then I tried the foliage dye, to see if it would do anything different. It, too, produced a dark tea colored dyebath that gave very little color after soaking for three days.

 The takeaway? Shades of beige are often the default color. Perhaps a zen mind capable of nonattachment is partly necessary for the natural dyer.

I considered the age of the materials I used to make the dyebath - dried leaves from many months beforehand, and the peeled bark of freshly pruned branches. Perhaps fresh leaves and older barks give a better color?

The experiment deserves another set of trials, but alas, I have running out of time as the semester winds down. I'm not entirely disappointed, as one student who said to me, "They look like pear colors."

They'll make a nice hat or set of mittens!

Resources:
1) Dean, Jenny. Wild Color. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1999. Print.