Work, the curse of the dyeing woman!

It happens every year at this time (at least for the last 30)

I start to notice all kinds of natural dye sources around the farm or wherever I be outdoors. The golden rod is in full bloom, the pokeberries are ripe, as are the elderberries. The morning glories are wound around every spent cornstalk and the marigolds are just flat out loaded.

I want to start collecting, and stuffing gallon jars, and mordanting wool, and generally making a mess of the tiny back porch and tiny kitchen. But this is also a busy time for getting ready for winter in more practical areas, firewood, hay, hoof trimming, manure spreading, garden bed clean up, row cover repair and so forth. Not to mention getting things ready for festivals, harvesting spindle making and trying to make a living.

But really, it makes sense that the color lust would peak just when the natural dye materials are ready to harvest, because there is a whole winter of spinning and knitting ahead and it would be nice to have our colors already dyed and ready at hand.

It strikes me so hard, that even when I am doing something else, like getting firewood, I think about it…as here

…this piece of bark that I peeled off of a black oak log, to save the inner bark for a bright yellow dye, or this shelf fungus growing on it…does it make a dye, too, I wonder?

But there is not really time to experiment with it, and these things will just pile up around the porch, little aborted projects to be swept off the porch come spring time.

This year, I have succumbed to the calling of color with a 5 minute dash around the yard clipboard and paper in hand, to get a quickie fix of natural color.

I visited the red cypress vine, dark purple morning glories, pokeberries, goldenrod, pink butterfly bush, marigolds and giant knotweed.

I grabbed a flower from each and rubbed a smudge of it on the paper, and this is what I got.

Now what I find interesting about this is that, it is kinda what you would expect. ‘Course, there is no mordant, no heating, etc, but see how the knotweed flowers, which where bright pink, yielded blue (indicating the indigo in this species) and the pink butterfly bush flowers, did not make pink, but made a green/yellow streak, which is what they would dye, and the orange marigold flowers made a bright yellow.

No, no time for wool, but it was a fun 5 minute color fix!

in the pink (or not)

Recently I was surprised at the mailbox when I opened a note from my sister Mary and nearly spilled the lovely pink contents out onto the gravel drive.

It turns out they were flowers from her orchid cactus, that she suspected (from a spill, I imagine) that they might contain a dye. Being ever inquisitive and generous, she saved them and mailed them on for my pleasure and experimentation.

They were so lovely, that I promptly dropped them in a jar of water for a “solar tea” type dye experiment. Immediately the water turned a nice shade of pink, like the color of red zinger tea.

My sister Mary is always full of surprises. She is not a fiber artist, but a “real” artist and story teller. Her newly spruced up website and blog at “Earththemes Studio” only reflect a fraction of her artistic skill in interpreting her love of nature and a good story, take a little peak and a little visit there and enjoy.

Meantime, back at the dye jar. I thought that I remember that hibisicus (a fugitive dye) might be mordanted to improve its fastness a tad by the use of alum. And I thought (without any information or research at all) that maybe because the color looked so similar that I could just pop a little fleece into some alum water and then into the magic red jar and voila!

Wrong.

I will spare you the sad photo of the moment that I put the mordanted fleece into the red liquid and it immediately turned an ugly, pale mustard yellow. Then it rinsed to white, which was probably a blessing.

Now I am wondering about hibisicus and hollyhock (not that this was either of those, or even remotely related, and not that my hollyhocks are going to have enough blooms to fiddle with this year) but curiosity is addictive.

An ungreen thing

It was an impulse buy, from a discount rack, at a discount craft store. I normally don’t succumb to impulse buys, because the thread I dangle from will not support them and groceries in the same week.

But, I was in the big city (Nashville) which is a rare thing, waiting in the parking lot of a musical instrument store for the boys to make their cable purchase (modern musicianship requires an amazing variety of cables) and there was this Hobby Lobby next door. Coming home from the big city without even a tiny souvenir seems a bit too spartan, but normally it is something like a box of stevia for sweetening, or something for the garden from Lowes that I can’t get locally.

I wandered through the entire store and as usual couldn’t find anything that I couldn’t live without, till I saw the “spray on” dye. Yep, it is in a spray can like paint, and you spray it on t-shirts and tote bags and such. How ungreen and wasteful is this? You can mix up dye and sponge it on the surface with the same results without the waste of the metal and manufacturing of the can…with a mixture of much guilt and much glee I brought it home.

It is intended for cotton, of course, but I threw down an old skein of worsted weight handspun romney lamb two ply onto a piece of newspaper and sprayed one side of it and one side of a matching sample square of knitting.

I let it dry a few days (got sidetracked on to something else) and then washed them both vigorously, fully expecting the dye to wash out, but it did not. Then I unraveled the knitting and compared it to the skein, the color repeats where about what you would expect, the knitted piece was short repeats of pink and white, the skein was long repeats. But the surprise was, it was nice! Soft hand, pretty, color (cranberry, I think it was) Could it be obtained in another way? sure, was this insanely quick and easy? sure. Kinda like the difference between a home cooked meal and going through the drive through. Not something you would normally confess or encourage, but it was interesting.

I balled them both up and took this photo to document the color, then set them aside, till now.