Dried Elderberries

It is the last day of January today, and I'm desperate to see any colour other than brown emerging from my dye bath. Yesterday, I tried steeping some dried elderberries in the hope of obtaining some purple tones, but look what I got! From the left, mordanted with alum, copper, alum plus tin, and alum plus iron.

Hopefully, when the elderberry leaves come out and the flowers and fruits come in, I'll obtain more colourful results than these. However, I've grouped all the skeins I dyed this month, sixty four altogether, into batches of seven, and this is what they look like. There's more variety there than I imagined. I've one oddball, blackberries mordanted with alum and tin. How that skein makes the yellow skeins pop!

Walnut Husks

The English walnut originated in Persia, so it is not, strictly speaking, a native tree, though its delicious nuts are always associated in my mind with Christmas celebrations. The parts of the tree from which dyestuff can be obtained are the husk, that is the outer green pericarp layer that protects the whole fruit, and the leaves. Walnut husks contain polyphenols that stain human skin and hair brown, so that walnut stain was used as a plot device by modern crime writer, Ben Johnson, in his book 'Charlie Peace: murder, mayhem and the master of disguise', to radically change his hero’s appearance and ethnicity. The husks are also used to make an ink for writing or drawing, and to make a brown fabric dye.  I am lucky in that our son-in-law’s parents have a mature walnut tree in their garden, so that I have access to walnut leaves and husks. I steeped the husks in my slow cooker on a low setting for three days before straining them and using the liquor to make a dye bath. Jenny Dean says that there is no need to mordant walnuts when dyeing, but I chose to be consistent in applying my four skein method. From the left, the skeins were mordanted with alum, copper, alum plus tin and alum plus iron. It will be interesting to see what colours I obtain from the leaves later on in the spring!

Goldenrod Tops

OK so this is cheating a bit. I've used some dried Goldenrod tops to dye these skeins. It will be interesting to see if I obtain different colours from fresh flowers and leaves when the plant comes into season. From the left, mordanted with alum, copper, alum + tin and alum + iron.

Rhubarb Root

This turned out to be one of the most staining dyestuffs that I've come across to date. The colour I obtained from my dye bath was rather like that of turmeric, a yellowish brown, but still brown! Maybe when I try again with some fresh young leaves later in the season, I'll obtain shades of green? From the left, mordanted with alum, copper, alum and tin, and alum and iron.

Distinctive Aromas

One thing I should have mentioned about the birch bark dye bath is its distinctive aroma. I can't think what, exactly, it reminds me of, but it was definitely evocative of some distant memory from my childhood. I'm preparing some rhubarb root this morning, and that emits a tangy peppery smell. The chamomile dye bath obviously evoked chamomile tea, but so many of the plants, barks and roots that I'm steeping in this winter season have clear culinary associations that I sometimes feel that I'm cooking up a storm!

Birch Bark Pink?

The results are in from my birch bark dye bath. I suppose that, stretching the imagination, the hues of brown have a slightly pinkish tinge, rather like washed-out mahogany. The shades are so close to one another that I'm glad that I added a 'marker' string of tapestry wool to each skein when extracting them from the dye pots/pans; yellow for alum, green for tin, orange for copper and grey for iron. Without such a marker, it could be difficult to work out which skein had been treated with which mordant once all the skeins had been washed and dried. From left to right, you are looking at the results for alum, copper, alum+tin and, much more distinctive, alum + iron.

Chamomile - getting ahead of myself

I am so looking forward to dyeing something that does not turn out to be brown, that I made a dye bath with some dried chamomile flowers. I'll be able to gather them fresh later on in the year. The results are shown below: from the left mordanted with alum, with copper, with alum+tin and finally alum + iron. The results are still a bit brown though. Well, fawn and khaki as well as a lovely clear yellow.

Oak Bark

Yesterday, I dyed four skeins with oak bark, using my standard four skein method. I'd hoped for shades of grey, but what I got was yet more brown. Admittedly, the colours (second photo down) were stronger, warmer shades of brown than my first batch (immediately below). My winter weaving should make great camouflage for a bird watcher! From the left, the second batch was mordanted with alum, copper, alum and tin and alum plus iron.

Gathering Birch Bark

This morning I visited my local park, Loughton Valley Park, to gather some birch bark  for dyeing.

According to the manuals, it should yield shades of pink. Some of the trees are shedding their bark naturally, so I was able to glean most of what I needed from the ground, but I also noticed that one or two tree trunks bore quite deep scars like the area shown at the bottom left of this photo, as though someone had cut out sections of bark. Not me, I can assure you! The cracks in the bark, top right, are natural fissures.

Now, the bark is stewing in my slow cooker. It will remain there for at least three days before I try to dye from it. The stewed oak bark that I gathered a few days ago has been transferred to a dye bath. I'm hoping for some deeper, grey tones from the oak bark on its own. I'll post those results tomorrow.

More Eucalyptus Leaves and Safflower

Yesterday I dyed another batch of Eucalyptus leaves, to see if I could get a pinker colour. No such luck! The latest batch was stewed for far longer than my first attempt, this time for nearly 24 hours. The alum plus iron on the extreme right in the photo immediately below is far darker than that of the original batch, also shown underneath, and (strangely) the alum and tin, next to it on the left is significantly paler, but all the shades show a strong family likeness.

So I dyed some Safflower petals as well in the hope of introducing a stronger colour into my palette. We don't (to my knowledge) grow Safflowers in Loughton yet but, in the Spring, I'm hoping to secure an allotment in which I can plant a Dyer's Garden, so if this plan materialises, I'll be able to include these skeins at some future date. These golden yellow skeins were mordanted, from the left, with alum, copper, alum + tin, and alum + iron.

Apple Prunings

Last week, I emptied the apple prunings from my garden out of the tub where they'd been stewing for over week, and into my slow cooker, with the aim of helping the slow process of dye release on its way.

Now at last, I've got around to emptying my slow cooker and dying four more skeins of wool with the apple-stained broth. The dye bath looked rather weak and unpromising, but the results were quite good. I'm struck by the contrast with using Procion dyes, where the dye bath usually looks concentrated but there is often quite a lot of dyestuff left over in the bath after use. So far as my experience of natural dying has been concerned, to date the dye baths have looked relatively weak but nearly all of the dyestuff has been exhausted from the bath during the dyeing process. Far more environmentally friendly in every way! From the left, my skeins were mordanted with alum, copper, alum plus tin and alum plus iron.

Oak twigs and bark

This morning I gathered some oak twigs and pieces of bark that were lying around the bole of our local specimen oak tree. I’d always thought it was a Holm Oak, because it marks the boundary with Loughton’s neighbouring grid square, which is called Great Holm, but my research has revealed that Holm Oaks are evergreen, which ours definitely is not! Apparently, there are about 600 species of Oak, as well as many hybrids, so although it is likely to be an English Oak, I cannot be absolutely sure. The Oak epitomises the spirit of England and for the ancient Celts it was believed to be a storehouse of wisdom embodied within its towering strength.

Like the Winterbourne Dye Project, my oak yielded a range of mouse brown dyes. As I’ve remarked before, winter can be a hard time for the natural dyer because there are not many dye plants to choose from. I can only agree with the Winterbourne Dyers, who remarked, “Some people may say (and some people DO say) why go to all this trouble to produce shades of brown?  Well, partly it is because we are just experimenting with what is available, and what is mainly available in January and February is tree prunings,

and partly it is so satisfying to produce colour, any colour, from plants that are around us.” Even though I’ve dyed yet another batch of brown wool, the colours from Oak are quite different from those I extracted from Yew and Eucalyptus, so I’m pleased with the results, especially the depth of colour delivered with a pinch of iron as a modifier/assistant. From the left the skeins have been mordanted with alum, copper, alum plus iron and alum plus tin.

Eucalyptus Bark

A few days ago, I set some Eucalyptus bark to simmer in my slow cooker. Yesterday, I dyed four skeins of wool with the resulting dye bath. First, having strained off the bark, I put three skeins of wool pre-mordanted with alum and one skein of wool pre-mordanted with copper into the dye bath and simmered it on my cooker for half an hour. The smaller, empty pans to either side are ready for the next stage.

After half an hour, I drew off a quarter of the dye liquor in to each of the two small pans, added a pinch of iron to the one at the back of the stove and a pinch of tin to the one at the front, and transferred a skein of the wool that had been pre-mordanted with alum from the large pot into each small pan. The difference in the colour of the different dye baths is clear in the photo. All three containers were left to simmer for another half an hour.

When the liquor had cooled sufficiently, all four skeins were extracted from their respective dye baths, washed with mild wool friendly detergent, rinsed well and hung up to dry. Jenny Dean described the colours obtained from Eucalyptus bark as being greens and beiges, but the colours I extracted from the bark of my tree were shades of brown, just as unexpected as the colours I extracted from the leaves of the same tree. From the left, the skeins were mordanted with alum, copper, alum + tin and alum + iron respectively. I've now used up all my pre-mordanted wool, so I'll need to make another batch tomorrow.

Brambles

I've long been an advocate of 'food for free'. Wild blackberries are plentiful around Loughton, and one of the great pleasures of a mild, sunny autumn day is to go blackberry-picking. But, legend has it, not after September 29, Michaelmas Day. The story goes that on that day the Archangel Michael, the greatest of all angels, defeated the angel Lucifer in battle and threw him down from Heaven into Hell, where he became the Devil. Lucifer landed on a thorny blackberry bush, which made him so furious that he spit (or in another version of the tale, he urinated) on the unfortunate bush and cursed its fruit. A more rational explanation of this snippet of folklore would be that the fruit taste less sweet when they are over-ripe and beginning to spoil from uncertain weather and early frosts. 

Yesterday, to make a change from brown dyes, I retrieved some of last autumn's blackberries from the freezer and brewed them up in my dye pot. The raw dye stock looked rather unpromising and the alum pre-mordanted wools rather like spaghetti, but I had a lovely surprise when I drew off some of the dye stock into small pan after half an hour's simmering, and added a pinch of tin. The mixture flashed dark purple, which transformed the skein of wool that I added to the pan. Adding a pinch of iron to a second pan yielded a dull brown. The alum and copper skein turned to a soft pinkish shades when washed and dried. From the left, the photo shows alum, copper, tin and iron mordanted wool. I remain pleased with my 'four skein method' as the results never fail to surprise me. 

Eucalyptus Leaves

In mid-winter the pickings are slim for dyers! There is not much to gather until the daffodils come into flower in March. The Winterbourne Dyers resolved this dearth of dyestuff by gathering apple wood, yew twigs and oak leaves in January. My apple prunings are still soaking (they will need to soak for at least another week before entering the dye bath) and I’ve already achieved some rich brown colours from the churchyard yews. I’ll go hunting around Loughton for oak leaves, twigs, acorns and galls later in the month. 

Meanwhile, yesterday I harvested some Eucalyptus bark (naturally shed) and leaves from the tree in my garden, as Jenny Dean suggests that these can be gathered at any time of year. As I write, the bark is simmering in my slow cooker and yesterday I simmered the leaves for about eight hours. The leaves are supposed to yield rusty-brown or dark red, but apparently this depends on the actual species of tree. I don’t know what mine is, but the dye from the leaves looked like it would turn out to be disappointingly beige. Amazingly, the addition of iron and tin gave me a nice brown and a vivid yellow. From the left, the wool was mordanted with alum, copper, alum and tin, and alum and iron.

The eucalyptus leaves were quite smelly to process. I breathed about five minutes of menthol, reminiscent of Vics VapoRub, followed by several hours of something that smelled acrid and more like cat’s pee! The unpleasant smell lingered, and was only banished after I inadvertently burnt this morning’s toast. Altogether, not an experiment to be repeated.

Horse Chestnut

The Horse Chestnut is a deciduous broadleaf tree native to the Balkan peninsula.It was introduced to the UK from Turkey in the late 16th century and it began the process of naturalisation in the 17th century, after having become a favourite parkland tree of landscape gardeners. It is also popular with MK’s landscape architects, and especially with those of the Parks Trust, and as a result Loughton’s linear park and several of its streets have been planted with Horse Chestnuts. My next door neighbour has one in his garden, which overhangs my studio. However, the trees are not faring well due to climate change, coupled with several debilitating diseases. The trees remain small, and the leaves suffer from browning off in late summer.

The husks and conkers of Horse Chestnut trees can be used as a horse medicine. The seeds contain saponin, which can be added to shampoo. Chemicals extracted from conkers are also used to treat strains and bruises. In the past, I’ve used our local Horse Chestnut trees as an inspiration for quilting, eco-print making, embroidery and paper making, so I was curious to see how they would fare as a dye source. 

After steeping and simmering the husks and conker parings, and employing the four skein method I described for dyeing yew bark and chippings, I managed to obtain a range of browns. Form the left they are as follows: pre-mordanted with alum, with copper, with alum and a  modifying pinch of tin, with alum and a modifying pinch of iron.

Nature Versus Nurture?

One of the issues that arises as soon as one considers natural dyestuffs is, what is ‘natural'? I have several trees, plants, flowers and vegetables growing in my own garden that yield dyestuff, including: onions, hawthorn, eucalyptus, ash, ivy, angelica, fennel, sage, St John’s wort, apple, daffodil, black elder, rowan, cardoons and day lily. Many of these are not native to Loughton or, indeed, to the UK. 

Apples, my first plant source, grew wild in Britain in the Neolithic period but it was the Romans who first introduced varieties with a sweeter taste. The earliest known mention of apples in England was by King Alfred in about 885 AD, but the variety of apple that I sourced my prunings from, Cox’s Orange Pippin, is much more recent than that, having been introduced into English orchards in 1850. The mother tree was raised by Richard Cox, a retired brewer from Bermondsey. It was probably widespread in cottage gardens in Loughton from late Victorian times onwards. 

Yew, my second source for natural dye, is one of three conifers that are native to Britain, the others being Juniper and Scots Pine. Yew trees can reach many hundreds of years old, and ten in Britain are believed to predate the 10th century. Our Loughton churchyard trees are ‘babies’ by comparison, dating from the end of the nineteenth century. Both these plants would have been available to local dyers before Milton Keynes was even a gleam in the town planner’s eye.

Today, locally in Loughton I can find many more dye-yielding plants including: yarrow, hollyhock, alder, birch, blackberry, cherry plum, blackthorn, rhubarb, docks, elderberry, elm, yew, carrot, fig, damson, iris, ragwort, reeds, sloes, snowberry, lichens, dahlia, Queen Anne’s lace, walnut, juniper, mahonia, bracken, oak, holm oak, stagshorn sumach, willow, dandelion, nettles, horse chestnut, floribunda roses and fuschia. Some of these grow in my neighbours' gardens, others in the modern linear park that has been planted by MK Parks Trust to follow the course of an ancient brook, but some of the plants on this list are weeds or wild flowers that are native to the UK. 

Many truly native plants yield only variants of green, yellow or brown that some might consider rather drab or boring. To obtain a true red or blue, I shall have to draw on cultivated plants. If I become even more enthusiastic about this project than I already am, I could plant a ‘dyer’s garden’ in our local allotment, to enrich the resources that are available to me locally to include more specialised plants like: dyer’s alkanet, dyer’s chamomile, pot and French marigold, heather, safflower, coreopsis, goldenrod, yellow cosmos, dahlias, lady’s bedstraw, dyer's woad, dyer’s knotweed (not the same as Japanese knotweed) weld, madder, comfrey and sunflowers. I make the rules for this project, but would this be considered ‘cheating’?

I propose to resolve this dilemma by allowing both wild and cultivated plants into my repertoire, but I may choose at a later date to differentiate native species from cultivated ones. This will allow me to explore both the colour palette that would have been available to the natural dyer some 50 years ago, before Milton Keynes came into being and when Loughton was a small village in the north Buckinghamshire countryside, and also the wider repertoire of colours that is available to the contemporary dyer, including varieties of exotic species found in local residents’ gardens and in the landscaping that has been introduced during recent times to support the new city’s development. The only restriction on my harvesting practice will be that everything should be sourced locally and sustainably (that is, without damaging the local ecology). 

It should be fun later on to classify my skeins of dyed yarn in order to illustrate a variety of concepts, such as the changing seasons, cultivated plants and weeds, different historical periods, even dyes obtained from different parts of the plant. 

Sadden and Gladden

I wrote yesterday that I like the concept of ‘saddening’ (dulling) a naturally coloured fibre with an iron assistant / modifier. Apparently, using tin as an assistant / modifier has the opposite effect of brightening the colour on the fibre. I’d like to think of this as ‘gladdening’ it!

My yew trimmings have been simmering for 72 hours in my slow cooker, and my alum and copper mordants have cooled overnight, so today it time to start dyeing. To prepare for this momentous occasion, I looked though some of my reference books on natural dyeing, and came across a suggestion in ‘The Complete Guide to Natural Dyeing’ by Eva Lambert and Tracey Kendall, that I’ve decided to adopt. 

In her recipes for dyeing yarn, Eva Lambert offers a general method for dyeing with plants, and four variants for each dye bath: alum mordant, copper mordant, alum modified with iron to ‘sadden’ the colour on the yarn, and alum modified with tin, to brighten, or using my term, ‘gladden’ it. Today, I tried these four variations on my yew trimmings, to see what happened. 

My method for dyeing the yew trimmings was as follows:

• Prepare the dye plants for the dye bath in the appropriate way (see earlier post), depending on the nature of the dyestuff (flowers, leaves, twigs, bark or roots), and strain the liquor into the dye pot.

• Prepare four skeins of wool by pre-mordanting three skeins with alum and one with copper.

• Add all four skeins of pre-mordanted wool to the dye bath and, if necessary, add sufficient water to cover the wool. Slowly bring the dye pot up to simmering point, taking care not to shock the wool by too rapid a rise in temperature.

• Simmer for half an hour.

• To ‘sadden’ a skein, after 30 minutes draw off about a quarter of the liquor from the main dye bath into a dye pan and add a pinch of iron mordant. Transfer one of the skeins of wool pre-mordanted with alum into the dye pan. Simmer for another 30 minutes.

• To ‘gladden’ a skein, after 30 minutes draw off about a quarter of the liquor from the main dye bath into another dye pan and add a pinch of tin mordant. Transfer one of the skeins of wool pre-mordanted with alum into the dye pan. Simmer for another 30 minutes.

• Meanwhile, continue to simmer the remaining two skeins, one pre-mordanted with alum and the other with copper, for another 30 minutes in the remaining dye bath.

• Remove the dye bath and the two dye pans from the heat and allow the contents of all three vessels to cool. Remove all four skeins of dyed wool, wash them in mild soapy water and rinse them until the water runs clear. Hang them up to dry.

Here are my four skeins, from left to right dyed with alum and copper mordants, and tin and iron modifiers.

Here’s what I learned when I dyed my wool skeins with yew bark and chippings using the method set out above:

• the whole process uses a lot of water. The skeins that come from the factory need to be washed in a mild detergent to remove any chemical residue from the manufacturing process, then rinsed a couple of times. After pre-mordanting, the skeins need to be rinsed again, two or three times to remove excess mordant. After dyeing, the skeins need to be washed with a mild detergent to remove excess dye, and then rinsed a couple of times until the water is clear. 

• with all this mordanting, dyeing, washing and rinsing, the skeins get a bit tangled, even though I tied each skein loosely at four points (the ties have to be loose so that the dye is not restricted from entering the wool).

• the three skeins pre-mordanted with alum need to have different coloured ties attached, so that once they have been plunged into the dye bath, it is still easy to distinguish the alum skein from alum + tin and alum + iron. In the case of the yew dye bath, the addition of a pinch of iron made that skein much darker, but the addition of tin did not greatly affect the colour of the skein.

• If I continue with this method of dipping four skeins per dye bath, I shall need three times as many alum-treated skeins as copper ones. This means that I shall need to adjust my recipe for alum, and pre-mordant six skeins at a time not five, so that each time I pre-mordant, I prepare two lots of three skeins to service two separate dye baths.

• I need to dedicate two small dye pans to ‘saddening’ and ‘gladdening’, in addition to my large dye bath, so I can carry out these additional processes without affecting the colour of the two skeins that remain in the main dye bath.

Its time to get to grips with Mordants

According to Jenny Dean, a mordant is a substance that has an affinity with both the fibre that is to be dyed and the natural plant dyestuff that has been chosen to colour the fibre. It therefore acts as a bond between fibre and dyestuff, so that the dye is driven permanently into the fibre. Even though many plants stain fibres when used without a mordant, the addition of a mordant will yield a stronger, more intense and more permanent, lightfast and wash-fast colour on the fibres.

Some plant dyes that contains a lot of tannin (such as indigo and woad) will fix onto the fibre without the need for a mordant. Other plants (such as oak galls, rhubarb leaves or the leaves of stagshorn sumach) contain natural mordants, and purists may choose to use them to fix natural dyestuffs. However, most dyers use chemical mordants, as these can be weighed more reliably. 

The most common chemical mordants used by dyers are compounds of aluminium (alum), copper and iron, though as iron dulls, darkens or ‘saddens’ naturally dyed colours (I just love the idea of a colour being saddened!) it is more often used as an ‘assistant’ or ‘modifier’ (that is, as a supplementary chemical during or after dyeing) than as an actual mordant. Chrome and tin can also be used as mordants. All mordants, including those derived naturally from plants, are poisonous to some degree, so they should be used and disposed of responsibly.

Different mordants yield different colours when combined with the same dyestuff. If three skeins of the same wool are mordanted with alum, copper and iron respectively, and placed in the same dye bath, three different colours will be obtained. I’m planning to explore this later on in my project.

Jenny Dean says that, although it is technically possible to mordant and dye fibres simultaneously in one combined process, to be most effective the fibres should be mordanted in a separate process to the actual dyeing. This is known as pre-mordanting. Once they have been pre-mordanted, the fibres can be dried, labelled and stored indefinitely for future use. I’m planning to pre-mordant my skeins of wool in batches of ten: five with alum and five with copper. 

I’ve set down the recipes for my alum and copper mordants as follows:

Recipe for Alum Mordant

Sufficient to mordant 5 x 20 gram skeins (i.e 100 grams, dry weight) of wool. The wool should be wetted thoroughly before it is mordanted so that the mordant will take evenly.

• 8 grams of alum dissolved in a small amount of boiling water in a jug

• 7 grams cream of tartar dissolved in a small amount of boiling water in a jug

• 100 grams (dry weight) of wool, already prepared to receive a mordant by having been tied loosely into a skein and washed in warm water containing a few drops of wool-friendly detergent to remove any dirt, grease or chemical residue from industrial processing

• 4 litres of cool water in a stock pot

Add first the dissolved cream of tartar and then the dissolved alum to the mordant bath and stir. Add the wetted wool and bring the bath up to simmering point. Simmer for one hour, agitating gently from time to time. Switch off the heat and leave the bath to cool overnight. Remove the skeins of wool from the cool mordant bath, rinse them and hang them up to dry or use them immediately in a dye bath.

Recipe for Copper Mordant

Sufficient to mordant 5 x 20 gram skeins (i.e 100 grams, dry weight) of wool. The wool should be wetted thoroughly before it is mordanted so that the mordant will take evenly.

• 2 grams of copper sulphate dissolved in boiling water in a jug

• 40 millilitres of vinegar

• 100 grams (dry weight) of wool, already prepared to receive a mordant by having been tied loosely into a skein and washed in warm water containing a few drops of wool-friendly detergent to remove any dirt, grease or chemical residue from industrial processing

• 4 litres of cool water in a stock pot

Add the coper sulphate solution and then the vinegar to the mordant bath. Stir well. Add the wetted wool and bring the bath up to simmering point. Simmer for one hour, agitating gently from time to time. By this point, the wool should be pale green and the water virtually clear. Switch off the heat and leave the skeins of wool to cool overnight. Remove the skeins, rinse them and either hang them to dry or use them in a dye bath at once.

If you try this, the first thing that may strike you is the small quantity of each chemical needed. I was so surprised that I felt I had to check my figures. I have bought enough alum to dye 312 x 20 gram skeins of wool, and enough copper to dye 1250 x 20 gram skeins of wool! I don’t think I’ll be running out of mordants for some considerable time. However, I could get through a lot of skeins of wool over the course of the year. 

To illustrate this point, the Winterbourne Dyers put eight skeins into each dye bath that they made up! Seven of these had been pre-mordanted with alum and one with copper. The first skein recorded their ‘standard’ colour, the second was tested for lightfastness, the third and fourth were over-dyed with woad and madder, the fifth was ‘modified’ with dilute distilled vinegar, the sixth with washing soda and the seventh with iron. The eighth was the copper mordanted skein. I’m fairly sure they were following Jenny Dean’s advice on modifying dye colours, as in ‘Wild Colour’ she suggests leaving one skein per dye bath unmodified as a standard shade, when playing with acid, alkaline, copper and iron modifiers to extend the range of colour from a dye bath. 

Jenny Dean’s standard colour swatches for each dye plant she recommends in ‘Wild Colour’ show what might be expected from the dye applied to an un-mordanted fibre, a fibre treated with an alum mordant, an un-mordanted colour with iron used as a ‘modifier’ after dyeing and a fibre that has been treated with both an alum mordant before dyeing and and an iron modifier after dyeing. 

I don’t think (at least, at this early stage in my project) that I shall be so ambitious, as I would soon accumulate many, many coloured skeins of wool. Right now, I’m thinking of dyeing just two skeins of wool per dye bath, one pre-mordanted with alum and the other with copper. 

Some plants are reported to yield bright colours when pre-mordanted with tin, so I may try this as a mordant at a later stage in my project, if it seems like a good idea. I may also make a separate experiment in the use of modifiers on one specific dye plant, where this would extend the range of colours that i could obtain in an interesting way. I’ll report on these ideas as I try them out. 

Yew Trimmings

Yesterday, 3rd January 2017, I prepared some yew wood for the dye pot. Our local church, All Saints' Loughton, has some yew trees in its churchyard that were planted to mark the beginning of the twentieth century. They are just about visible in the photo. They overhang Church Lane. A few weeks ago, a large lorry tried to squeeze down the lane, and in so doing it ripped away a large branch, which my husband (a Churchwarden) retrieved and brought home to burn on our open fire. Apparently, yew burns hot and bright! yesterday morning, I managed to pare off  350 grams of yew bark and soft wood with a sharp kitchen knife.

In her 'A Dyer's Manual' (1982) Jill Goodwin suggests that yew yields pink, red or orange, which would make perfect sense as, when I pared away the bark and outer layer of soft wood, it was pale pink in colour. The heartwood was orange, but the branch was so heavy, dense and strong that I had no hope of reaching that. Jenny Dean does not mention yew in her book, but I found a piece by her on the Internet which suggests pouring boiling water over the chipping, leaving them to soak overnight and then boiling for an hour. The resulting liquid can be strained, poured off into a dye bath to dye wool mordanted with alum by simmering it for 45 minutes or so.

The Winterbourne Dyers took a slightly different approach in that they simmered their yew twigs for three days in a slow cooker to release the dye. I decided to adopt that strategy as I could leave the pot to stew away quietly in the greenhouse while I got on with some mordanting. However, I started the process with boiling water, to speed things up a bit. When I looked in on the brew this morning, it was bubbling away nicely and the water had turned a rich orange, so fingers crossed!

Monday 2nd January

This is perhaps a good time to introduce my yarn. I've chosen to work with natural merino wool, as it takes dye exceptionally well and is also good for weaving. I am sourcing my yarn from the Chester Wool Company. Here's what they say on their website:

"At Chester Wool Co, we manufacture and wholesale a range of more than 120 natural white (undyed) yarns for hand-dye artists. The company is owned and run by Andy Robinson, who has over 30 years of experience in all aspects of the textile trade. Jeni Hewlett recently joined the team; she has an extensive knowledge of hand dyeing and we're looking forward to using her expertise to further expand our extensive range.

We believe that we offer the largest stock supported service in Europe, from our warehouse and distribution centre based near Chester, UK.  We supply all yarn weights from 1200 metres per 100g to 70 metres per 100g, and the majority of our stock is in 100 gram hanks, ready for the dye pot. We use superior natural fibres to create this stunning range. The primary fibres in our blends are South American Merino wool, 100% UK Bluefaced Leicester, Baby Alpaca, Silk and Cashmere. Wholesale prices are applicable for orders of 5 kilos upwards, and we are able to offer custom-spun yarns for orders in excess of 100 kilos."

With hindsight, it is obvious to me that I failed to spot the significance of the word 'wholesale' as, when I rang them to order some mini-skeins for dyeing, I was politely informed that their usual order is of at least five kilos. However, when I explained what I was up to, they kindly agreed to sell me a kilo of yarn, wound into mini-skeins of 20 grams each. That's still 50 skeins! OK, it sounds like a lot, but I've already realised that if I dye a reference skein of each plant source without a mordant, another with alum as a mordant, one with copper, and maybe occasionally one with tin, I'll soon exhaust the kilo I have purchased. It already feels like I'll be sending off for a pack of five kilos before the end of January.

New Year's Day

The start of the New Year saw us out in the garden to prune our Cox's apple tree. The bucket of prunings will (hopefully) yield my first colours of Loughton. I'm using 'Wild Colour' by Jenny Dean as my main reference point, alongside other books about natural dyeing that I'll introduce as I go along and, of course, the Internet. There's not a lot of choice as to suitable plant material at this time of year, but apple bark and twigs can be harvested, as it is a good time to carry out winter pruning. I'm following in the footsteps of the Winterbourne ladies here, as chopped apple twigs provided their first experiments into dyeing. To prepare the prunings for dyeing, it is necessary to chop them into small pieces and soak them - Jenny says for a week, the Winterbourne ladies for a fortnight - to release the dye. The water in my bucket is already beginning to turn brown as I write.

 I'll gather some young leaves when they emerge in the spring, but meanwhile a little patience is required.

New Year, New Project

With the start of 2017 comes a new project. This year, Milton Keynes, the city in which I live, will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its foundation. As a local textile artist, I am planning a project to celebrate this important milestone. I shall explore the potential that my surroundings afford for natural dyeing.

I was inspired to explore natural dyeing after reading about the Winterbourne Dye Project, based in the Winterbourne Botanic Garden in Edgebaston, Birmingham. For more information on the Winterbourne Dye Project see the 2016 Winter Issue of The Journal of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers or visit their blog at http://tinyurl.com/winterbourne-dye. Over the course of this anniversary year,  I shall harvest parts of the many plants that grow locally around my home in Loughton, Milton Keynes, using ecologically sound principles, including their leaves, flowers, berries, nuts, bark, stems and roots. I shall process these in order to extract natural dyestuff, which will then be applied to skeins of pure wool. These will be incorporated into a series of weavings to encapsulate the ever-changing seasonal colours of Loughton.

The exciting thing about natural dyes is that in many instances it is far from obvious what colour will be released from the dyestuff. Nearly everyone knows that onion skins yield orange dye, blackberries deep purple and beetroot pink, but it is less obvious that a dye can be obtained from apple pruning or ivy berries. I have read that the colours produced by plants may vary according to the time of day, season and weather conditions at the time of gathering, the mordants used to fix the dye and the concentration of the dye bath. As well as reflecting the colours of Loughton, it is exciting to consider that the weavings I make will reflect my very personal journey into the world of natural dyeing.

The purpose of this blog is to record that journey, beginning with my preparations for this year-long project. In the dying week of 2016 (no pun intended!) I converted my greenhouse into a dyeing studio. As well as a heater, essential during the winter months, this now contains a two ring hob, a kettle, a slow cooker, some stainless steel stock pots (cast iron pots and pans could 'sadden' the colour of my natural dyes), plastic tubs for steeping raw material to break it down, weighing scales and a basket containing my newly-purchased mordants, which I shall introduce when I prepare my first skeins of wool to receive their dyes. Let the project begin!