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.