Dye experiments: Tansy & Tansy
Aug. 25th, 2012 11:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
janestarzJust a warning up front: this will probably be my last dye experiment for a while. My pan is starting to get some discolouration and I've run out of plant material.
So far I've not really made a colour I'd want to produce for clothes from the plants I can get an abundance of. The pokeweed berries were really nice on linen, but I will not get enough berries for an entire shirt until next year.
So enjoy this last one!
We'd separated the flower heads from the rest of the tansy and since I only have so many buckets lying around I figured I'd start with the plant parts and leave the flowerheads until later. These are easily stored in jars, and their volume was only a liter or so. Buckets of dried plant parts are far more difficult to store and keep dry.
I went about this day rather scientifically:
- 6 liters of water
- 1.5 liters of vinegar
- Keep it all at 90°C for two hours
Imagine my disappointment when I removed my fabrics and they were... well, off-white is the word.
They hardly picked up any dye and didn't even remotely resemble the "lovely golden colour' that other websites mentioned. Or perhaps a lovely light green would have done, I'm sure. It's always a surprise what comes out of a dye bath, and you can't quite tell what it'll be before it's rinsed and dried. But sometimes it's just a disappointment.
I got frustrated and determined to do better. It was only 2 pm, I could still pick up some supplies and try again with the flowerheads!
So I picked up two 75 gram sticks of alum at my drug store, measured six liters of water (since half the water from my first dye bath had evaporated, I figured starting out with six liters would be a good thing) and read up on alum, what it was and how toxic it was. I was sceptical about dissolving two solid sticks of alum in water -- it would probably take forever -- and wanted to grate them into smaller chunks.
Wikipedia soon told me I needn't fret. Alum is used in a variety of ways including in water management (so it's probably not very toxic) and it's also water soluble. Of course, this meant I chucked the two sticks in the hot water in their entirety. They dissolved pretty quickly!
Since other blogs threw their yarn in with the flowerheads and I was getting pretty impatient to yield some interesting results, I threw everything in all at once.
Flowerheads, fabric and yarn, all being kept at roughly 90°C for two hours. The dye bath itself is a lovely shade of goldish brown, but the flowerheads started to break up in the bath. Little thread-like particles of roughly half a centimeter long were clinging to my fabrics as I pulled them out of the dye bath. I can imagine if you want a solid result without weird bits, you'd really need to sieve the dye bath before throwing in your fabrics.
They say you should rinse out your fabrics until the water runs clear. Since I don't have a handy stream or lake on hand and I'm not accustomed of taking my fabrics into the shower with me, I use a big, big bucket. And I'm not rinsing until the water runs clear, because that would take several hundred liters of water!
After drying, these are the results!
Top: Silk, wool and cotton in a tansy leaf dye bath using vinegar as a mordant. Ugh.
Bottom: Silk, wool and cotton yarn in a tansy flower dye bath using alum as a mordant. Yay!
Lesson learned: if you don't succeed, try again with a diferent mordant!
Because I already spent most of the day waiting for fabrics to dye, I decided against re-using the dye bath. There was already yellow residue settling on my kettle, so I threw everything out.
The linens are not in the above picture. I re-used the length of linen from the first bath in the second batch, and it turned a lovely golden yellow.
I can honestly say I would love to retry this dye experiment, with alum and tansy, next year. It's too bad yellow isn't my colour, but I just know that doesn't matter for a pair of hosen!
So far I've not really made a colour I'd want to produce for clothes from the plants I can get an abundance of. The pokeweed berries were really nice on linen, but I will not get enough berries for an entire shirt until next year.
So enjoy this last one!
We'd separated the flower heads from the rest of the tansy and since I only have so many buckets lying around I figured I'd start with the plant parts and leave the flowerheads until later. These are easily stored in jars, and their volume was only a liter or so. Buckets of dried plant parts are far more difficult to store and keep dry.
I went about this day rather scientifically:
- 6 liters of water
- 1.5 liters of vinegar
- Keep it all at 90°C for two hours
Imagine my disappointment when I removed my fabrics and they were... well, off-white is the word.
They hardly picked up any dye and didn't even remotely resemble the "lovely golden colour' that other websites mentioned. Or perhaps a lovely light green would have done, I'm sure. It's always a surprise what comes out of a dye bath, and you can't quite tell what it'll be before it's rinsed and dried. But sometimes it's just a disappointment.
I got frustrated and determined to do better. It was only 2 pm, I could still pick up some supplies and try again with the flowerheads!
So I picked up two 75 gram sticks of alum at my drug store, measured six liters of water (since half the water from my first dye bath had evaporated, I figured starting out with six liters would be a good thing) and read up on alum, what it was and how toxic it was. I was sceptical about dissolving two solid sticks of alum in water -- it would probably take forever -- and wanted to grate them into smaller chunks.
Wikipedia soon told me I needn't fret. Alum is used in a variety of ways including in water management (so it's probably not very toxic) and it's also water soluble. Of course, this meant I chucked the two sticks in the hot water in their entirety. They dissolved pretty quickly!
Since other blogs threw their yarn in with the flowerheads and I was getting pretty impatient to yield some interesting results, I threw everything in all at once.
Flowerheads, fabric and yarn, all being kept at roughly 90°C for two hours. The dye bath itself is a lovely shade of goldish brown, but the flowerheads started to break up in the bath. Little thread-like particles of roughly half a centimeter long were clinging to my fabrics as I pulled them out of the dye bath. I can imagine if you want a solid result without weird bits, you'd really need to sieve the dye bath before throwing in your fabrics.
They say you should rinse out your fabrics until the water runs clear. Since I don't have a handy stream or lake on hand and I'm not accustomed of taking my fabrics into the shower with me, I use a big, big bucket. And I'm not rinsing until the water runs clear, because that would take several hundred liters of water!
After drying, these are the results!
Top: Silk, wool and cotton in a tansy leaf dye bath using vinegar as a mordant. Ugh.
Bottom: Silk, wool and cotton yarn in a tansy flower dye bath using alum as a mordant. Yay!
Lesson learned: if you don't succeed, try again with a diferent mordant!
Because I already spent most of the day waiting for fabrics to dye, I decided against re-using the dye bath. There was already yellow residue settling on my kettle, so I threw everything out.
The linens are not in the above picture. I re-used the length of linen from the first bath in the second batch, and it turned a lovely golden yellow.
I can honestly say I would love to retry this dye experiment, with alum and tansy, next year. It's too bad yellow isn't my colour, but I just know that doesn't matter for a pair of hosen!
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no subject
Date: 2012-08-27 07:45 am (UTC)I had a greyish (natural, non-bleached) linen fabric, used vinegar as a mordant and used the tansy-flower-water I had made earlier in an aluminum pan. The result was grey with a slightly yellow sheen. Meh. I too had seen the brilliant colors elsewhere on the web so I was greatly disappointed.
When the next day I used ammonia (in water) to clean a to-be-painted cabinet I noticed that the residue of the dye on my hands suddenly became much more bright yellow. So I dunked my 'yellow' fabric in to the ammonia water and lo and behold! Color! Of course it dried up much lighter again, but the yellow is more present now.
I still think that I should start with a lighter (nearly white) fabric and use the flowers themselves, not some extract, and perhaps use alum instead of vinegar for a real yellow result. So I have bleached my last piece of linen, picked some more tansy (we still have lots here growing around) and I'll try again later. I already got alum last week, so I'm good to go. :)
I'm hoping for the kind of yellow that your yarn is showing. :)
no subject
Date: 2012-08-28 08:44 am (UTC)It's quite magical to get such a saturated colour from just plants, I must say. The linen fabric is very yellow indeed, but if I wash it, it'll probably get lighter.