A Colorful Day's Work

[altivo]

Colorful Day's Work Some of the results of about 8 of us playing with wool, silk, and natural dyes on July 11, 2009. There are more colors, but they were hanging over the porch railing and outside the frame. The rippling pink and violet stuff in the foreground is a pile of silk "handkerchiefs" which are not actually woven, but merely stretched sheets of raw silk ready for dyeing and spinning. These were dyed with cochineal, using various mordants. The nearly black and charcoal wools were dyed with logwood, the red and burgundy samples next to the left with cochineal. The brassy colors at the far left of the table were dyed with fustic. The pale bluegreen yarn at the top left has not yet been dyed at all. That's the color left by using copper sulfate as a mordant. Photo courtesy of Barb Bundick.

Comments

[ducktapeddonkey.livejournal.com]

My favorite colors.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We had a lot of browns, golds, and yellows too, but they aren't in this photo.

I actually prefer blues and greens myself, but we didn't get into the indigo. The best greens come from dyeing twice, applying indigo blue over the top of deep yellows or golds. We plan to try another session and do some of that.

[merik.livejournal.com]

Very nice!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You might find one of these processes suitable for a demonstration, if you get into that practical applications for metal salts thing. Let me know if you need references or some help selecting a local plant source for the color.

Indigo gives the most dramatic demonstration, in my opinion, but that doesn't involve metals as mordants. It's a reduction followed by oxidation. You see the color disappear as the dyebath is heated up and the pigment is reduced to make it water soluble. It becomes yellowish and transparent. The wool comes out of the bath yellow-green in color, and gradually turns blue before your eyes as the oxygen in the air re-oxidizes and restores the insoluble blue pigment on the surfaces of the fiber.

Natural dye sources that produce dramatic and brilliant colors are readily available from hobbyist supply houses. The cochineal used to get the colors in the photo is an example, and a small amount goes a long way. Artificial synthesis of some of these dye chemicals, including alizarin and indigo, was one of the early commercial successes of organic chemistry (but you probably know that.)

[hrrunka]

Cochineal... I remember (as a kid of six or seven) being fascinated to discover that the white fluffy infection on some prickly pear plants would bleed an intense red when poked with a prickly pear spine...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. I've never seen it in situ so I didn't realize it was so dramatic there. I was a bit grossed out to learn that cochineal was widely used as a food coloring agent because it is so intense. Bugs in the pink lemonade! Of course most people, including those who used it, probably had no idea what the source was.

[felder.livejournal.com]

ooh nice colours! very nice indeed hon.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Wait till you see the oranges, golds and yellows that weren't in this photo. We also got some other shades from the logwood, including a chocolate brown color. It's too early yet for black walnut hulls, and those are another source for rich browns.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Those silk hankies with the pink and violet look just like some flowers we have blooming at the moment, very nice ^.^

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, they are floral in appearance aren't they?

We actually had a different floral experience, too. One of the dyepots was made up from daisy fleabane, a common weed here that stands about a meter tall and has hundreds of tiny white daisy-like flowers. I'd have said it just smelled like grass when it was simmering with the wool in it, but when it came time to cool it and rinse the fiber, the scent of thousands of blossoms was released into the kitchen. It smelled like floral perfume, and was actually very pleasant. I guess it was the ghost of all those flowers we cooked. ;p

The colors from that were nice too. Shades of yellow ranging from lemon to carrot, and a sort of pale green.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Nothing funny but...that sorta turns me on.

Great work. I love purple.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm really tired of purple. The other colors that aren't showing were much more interesting to me. I'll get the new set of photos sorted out and loaded somewhere soon.