French Marigold Bling!

The French marigolds gave me an amazing range of colours. Who would have thought it!

French Marigolds

The hot weather has brought the French Marigolds into flower in my Dyer's Garden. There are just about enough flowering heads to take a harvest. The  chamomile and the cosmos are on their way to flowering too. We just need some rain, as well as sunshine, to encourage them.

Litha

I've just finished putting my midsummer warp, Litha, on my Saori loom. There are 26 different colours in this warp, all dyed using plant materials gathered from my local environment, Loughton in Milton Keynes. I can't wait to get weaving.

St John's Wort Flowers

I'm getting back into a regular routine again, after my break from four skein dyeing. Jenny Dean says that one specific variety of the plant, Hypericum perforatum, produces four different shades of red, green, reddish-maroon and yellow, if the flowers are treated in a particular way. I did not read the text sufficiently carefully, so I simmered my flowers for several hours, before checking with the instructions and realising that the flowers from my variety of Hypericum would never yield a deep red liquid, however long I simmered them, because they were from an ordinary Hypericum, of the variety 'Hidcote'. However, I did obtain some pretty yellowish tan shades: from the left mordanted with alum, copper, alum + tin and alum + iron.

Sage Leaves and Tops

Its been a while since I posted, as I've been taking an Eco-dyeing Module with Justine Aldersey-Williams of The Wild Dyery. It focussed on the three main historical, first rate (permanent) dye plants: indigo, weld and madder, and on Shibori dyeing cotton and silk cloth, so quite a change from my usual approach to dyeing my wool skeins. In parallel with the Module, I carried out a couple of 'mass mordants', on 25 and 30 skeins of wool at a time, mordanted with different chemicals, immersed in one dye bath (weld and madder, respectively) and then modified with other chemicals, as described in Jenny Dean's book, Wild Colour. Interesting, but I feel much more relaxed now that I've returned to the working method that I've already established. So here are my four skeins dyed with sage: from the left, mordanted with alum, copper, alum assisted by tin, and alum assisted by iron.

Apple Leaves

My Cox's Orange Pippin is now in full leaf, so I decided to try dyeing with the leaves, to see what colours I would obtain. Jenny Dean's 'Wild Colours' (My Bible) suggests that one can expect shades of mustard and brown, depending on the time of year when the leaves are collected.

The dye bath (steeped overnight on a very slow heat) looked rather weak, and an unpromising yellow, when I looked at a spoonful. I obtained some quite subtle shades, through. They make an interesting comparison with the stronger, though not dissimilar, shades I obtained from the apple pruning in January. The set of leaf-dyed skeins are uppermost, mordanted, (from the left) with alum, copper, alum + iron and alum + tin; the lower set are the results from pruning, mordanted (again, from the left) with alum, copper, and rather confusingly with alum + iron and then alum + tin.

Madder Still

So now I've used up all of the rest of my madder root to dye 30 toning skeins in one dye bath. My conclusion is that the method is quite tough on the wool, and also that my implements, especially my dye pan, are too small to dye large batches of wool successfully. There is insufficient room to allow the individual skeins to float freely. I'll be returning to small batch dyeing (four skeins at a time) from now on.