Dye experiments: Goldenrod
Aug. 20th, 2012 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
janestarzTo be honest, yellow is one of the easiest colours to create from plants, because the list of plants and flowers that give yellow dye is pretty darn long. But it's cool to have succeeded.
Tansy (Boerenwormkruid) drying in the sun.
What follows is a pretty long description that would not go amiss as a dress diary, so please follow me behind the cut and exclamation of: "We made a yellow!"
I'd gathered flowers for dye experiments on Friday and I had placed them outside in the garden cupboard I never found a use for. One day later most of the tansy had dried out magnificently, but that was more due to the awesome sunshine than the cupboard, no doubt.
I'd suspended the goldenrod (Guldenroedekruid) from the rose arch and it was dry enough to work with on Sunday as well. While harvesting, the bundles of flowers were tied together and dumped into a saddlebag on my bike. The bundles were somewhat larger than the 'O' I can make by pressing index finger and thumb together.
The Goldenrod was cut into pieces in a bucket:
Because I have never done this (successfully) before, and I couldn't find How-To-Dye-With-Goldenrod webpages online, we used the entire plant. I don't know if this is good or really, really bad.
Everything was dumped into a large pan and I added water until most of the goldenrod was under water. According to the website I had found a few days previous, you should add 1 part vinegar for 4 parts water when working with flowers or plants, but I only added half a liter of vinegar, while there was more than 2 liters of water. A lot more.
Ready to start cooking!
The pan was placed on the stove and I cranked up the heat, getting the concoction to a near-boil. I've read that boiling everything is detrimental for the dye, but there are people who do this on woodfires, and their dye pots are boiling, and it's no problem. On the other hand, I've read pages where people re-use their dye baths and leave their wool in overnight to soak up all it can, while the heat is completely off.
Suffice to say: we had enough things to try our hand at!
Meanwhile, outside, Steelweaver and myself were ripping the Tansy flowerheads from the stems and sorting the pieces into bowls while enjoying a cool footbath and iced coffee. It was 35°C out there, so we deserved all the shade and iced coffee we could get!
Tansy flowerheads. Don't pick Tansy ragwort (the one with the petals), it can be poisenous!
On the stove nearby, the Goldenrod/vinegar/water mixture was nearly boiling. I set the alarm for an hour, because I don't know how long it should be this hot.
After said hour, I used a spatula with holes (schuimspaan) to remove most of the plant matter and sieved the rest to get out most of the plant stuff. Officially, you're supposed to strain it through a cloth, but I was lazy. Small bits of plant were still in my mixture but it didn't seem like it would be a problem.
The goldenrod has changed colour somewhat; the vibrant green and yellow colours have faded into what we called "puke-olive-green".
From left to right: linen, silk and wool.
Fabrics are going in! I had a 150x150 cm piece of linen that should be large enough for a tunic or a pair of hosen. There was a bit of raw silk of 30 cm squared and a bit of white wool of 30 cm squared, all going into the hot pot all at once.
The dye bath itself is a lovely shade of golden brown. Quite a disgusting colour, but then it smelled like gherkins. It must be the vinegar. You never know what colour your dye bath will come up with -- just because it looks brown doesn't necessarily mean your fabrics will be brown too, right?
After one hour we checked the fabrics and decided to let everything simmer for another hour. The heat is still on and the dye bath is steady at 80 °C or some such. (left picture).
After the second hour, it's time to start rinsing out, because it's already past our teatime and we've run out of cookies and Tansy both! (right picture)
The difference between the two pictures? Well, one has the silk on top. And I do believe the linen is a darker shade of yellow in the right picture, but it's hard to be sure.
I carefully extract the soaked fabrics with my spatula's and leave them in the sink for a bit. Parts of the linen are really very yellow. Perhaps these were in a hotter part of the pot, near the bottom? This of course begs the question: was my dye bath hot enough? Should I have stirred more often?
Using our footbath and fresh water, I rinse out the fabrics. This is no chore with the weather being this hot and the water that I'm rinsing with is so cold. You can see it gets quite yellow!
Steelweaver is tying up bits of cotton yarn to throw into the dye bath, that has been transferred to a copper kettle. I don't mind permanent stains in that copper thing, but the white pan we sometimes use to make Big Soup in, so I'd like to keep that somewhat clean.
The cotton yarn is thrown into the copper pot and left there for some 12 to 14 hours, overnight. It stays outside, so it probably cooled down to some 20°C.
And here are the final results!
The background fabric is the linen, including the darker yellow stains. I'm not quite sure what caused them, but heat is a good guess. Another possible cause is not sieving the dye bath by using cheesecloth, so perhaps those last bits of plant have dissolved close to the fabric or into the fabric, but it's anybody's guess.
On the bottom left is the wool. You can't really tell from the picture, but the folds in the wool seem darker than the rest of the wool, although that could be a trick of the eye.
The darkest fabric is the raw silk. This was already darker than the pristine white linen we started out with, but it certainly reacts differently to the plant dye.
The yarn is a lovely shade of yellow too, although the dye didn't catch evenly on that either, but then we didn't prewash the yarn or stir it during the night.
(Please note that the fabrics might be a little less vibrant than they seem in this picture. This is Bibble's fault.)
Mordant: vinegar
Concentration: 500 ml mordant, perhaps 10 liters of water, one bucket of goldenrod
Dye temp: 80°C & cold
Dye time: 2 hours for the primary batch, approx. 12-14 hours for the secondary batch
Batch number: Primary batch and secondary batch from the dye bath
All in all, very interesting results for a first time! And the best news so far is that I have plenty of tansy for two or three more experiments.
Tansy (Boerenwormkruid) drying in the sun.
What follows is a pretty long description that would not go amiss as a dress diary, so please follow me behind the cut and exclamation of: "We made a yellow!"
I'd gathered flowers for dye experiments on Friday and I had placed them outside in the garden cupboard I never found a use for. One day later most of the tansy had dried out magnificently, but that was more due to the awesome sunshine than the cupboard, no doubt.
I'd suspended the goldenrod (Guldenroedekruid) from the rose arch and it was dry enough to work with on Sunday as well. While harvesting, the bundles of flowers were tied together and dumped into a saddlebag on my bike. The bundles were somewhat larger than the 'O' I can make by pressing index finger and thumb together.
The Goldenrod was cut into pieces in a bucket:
Because I have never done this (successfully) before, and I couldn't find How-To-Dye-With-Goldenrod webpages online, we used the entire plant. I don't know if this is good or really, really bad.
Everything was dumped into a large pan and I added water until most of the goldenrod was under water. According to the website I had found a few days previous, you should add 1 part vinegar for 4 parts water when working with flowers or plants, but I only added half a liter of vinegar, while there was more than 2 liters of water. A lot more.
Ready to start cooking!
The pan was placed on the stove and I cranked up the heat, getting the concoction to a near-boil. I've read that boiling everything is detrimental for the dye, but there are people who do this on woodfires, and their dye pots are boiling, and it's no problem. On the other hand, I've read pages where people re-use their dye baths and leave their wool in overnight to soak up all it can, while the heat is completely off.
Suffice to say: we had enough things to try our hand at!
Meanwhile, outside, Steelweaver and myself were ripping the Tansy flowerheads from the stems and sorting the pieces into bowls while enjoying a cool footbath and iced coffee. It was 35°C out there, so we deserved all the shade and iced coffee we could get!
Tansy flowerheads. Don't pick Tansy ragwort (the one with the petals), it can be poisenous!
On the stove nearby, the Goldenrod/vinegar/water mixture was nearly boiling. I set the alarm for an hour, because I don't know how long it should be this hot.
After said hour, I used a spatula with holes (schuimspaan) to remove most of the plant matter and sieved the rest to get out most of the plant stuff. Officially, you're supposed to strain it through a cloth, but I was lazy. Small bits of plant were still in my mixture but it didn't seem like it would be a problem.
The goldenrod has changed colour somewhat; the vibrant green and yellow colours have faded into what we called "puke-olive-green".
From left to right: linen, silk and wool.
Fabrics are going in! I had a 150x150 cm piece of linen that should be large enough for a tunic or a pair of hosen. There was a bit of raw silk of 30 cm squared and a bit of white wool of 30 cm squared, all going into the hot pot all at once.
The dye bath itself is a lovely shade of golden brown. Quite a disgusting colour, but then it smelled like gherkins. It must be the vinegar. You never know what colour your dye bath will come up with -- just because it looks brown doesn't necessarily mean your fabrics will be brown too, right?
After one hour we checked the fabrics and decided to let everything simmer for another hour. The heat is still on and the dye bath is steady at 80 °C or some such. (left picture).
After the second hour, it's time to start rinsing out, because it's already past our teatime and we've run out of cookies and Tansy both! (right picture)
The difference between the two pictures? Well, one has the silk on top. And I do believe the linen is a darker shade of yellow in the right picture, but it's hard to be sure.
I carefully extract the soaked fabrics with my spatula's and leave them in the sink for a bit. Parts of the linen are really very yellow. Perhaps these were in a hotter part of the pot, near the bottom? This of course begs the question: was my dye bath hot enough? Should I have stirred more often?
Using our footbath and fresh water, I rinse out the fabrics. This is no chore with the weather being this hot and the water that I'm rinsing with is so cold. You can see it gets quite yellow!
Steelweaver is tying up bits of cotton yarn to throw into the dye bath, that has been transferred to a copper kettle. I don't mind permanent stains in that copper thing, but the white pan we sometimes use to make Big Soup in, so I'd like to keep that somewhat clean.
The cotton yarn is thrown into the copper pot and left there for some 12 to 14 hours, overnight. It stays outside, so it probably cooled down to some 20°C.
And here are the final results!
The background fabric is the linen, including the darker yellow stains. I'm not quite sure what caused them, but heat is a good guess. Another possible cause is not sieving the dye bath by using cheesecloth, so perhaps those last bits of plant have dissolved close to the fabric or into the fabric, but it's anybody's guess.
On the bottom left is the wool. You can't really tell from the picture, but the folds in the wool seem darker than the rest of the wool, although that could be a trick of the eye.
The darkest fabric is the raw silk. This was already darker than the pristine white linen we started out with, but it certainly reacts differently to the plant dye.
The yarn is a lovely shade of yellow too, although the dye didn't catch evenly on that either, but then we didn't prewash the yarn or stir it during the night.
(Please note that the fabrics might be a little less vibrant than they seem in this picture. This is Bibble's fault.)
Mordant: vinegar
Concentration: 500 ml mordant, perhaps 10 liters of water, one bucket of goldenrod
Dye temp: 80°C & cold
Dye time: 2 hours for the primary batch, approx. 12-14 hours for the secondary batch
Batch number: Primary batch and secondary batch from the dye bath
All in all, very interesting results for a first time! And the best news so far is that I have plenty of tansy for two or three more experiments.
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no subject
Date: 2012-08-20 05:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-20 06:55 pm (UTC)Tune in tomorrow ;-)
no subject
Date: 2012-08-20 05:55 pm (UTC)I have now 2 bottles of brownish onion water and two and a half bottle of sickly green 'zevenblad' water. It smelled really bad while it was boiling.
I have a natural (non bleached, so kind of grey) linen for a simple dress, but I think I'll save the dying experiments for some scraps from which I'll make some pouches probably.
Do let us know how that tansy works out. I found a nice harvesting place today when trying out the route to my new dance lessons. If it's any good I might pick some.
~Brenda~
no subject
Date: 2012-08-20 06:56 pm (UTC)I had no idea you could save the dye water for later use.... *ponders*
I'm already onto the next dye experiment, so far it looks pink. Tune in tomorrow ;-)
no subject
Date: 2012-08-21 07:04 am (UTC)You can also use several dye waters in a row to get color blends, or so I read.