Onion cushion

Yikes! It's been over a year since I've posted, which is just ridiculous. Where did that year go? I think I must have spent it drinking beer and watching The Tudors or something, rather than crafting. I do remember making a few wigs and doing some lino cutting, but I must have fallen out of the habit of dyeing and knitting. I got my yarn mojo back over the Christmas break, though, and finished this cushion:



The knitted side was made with the four yarns that I dyed in this post.

I wanted some brown fabric for the back but couldn't find anything suitable in either John Lewis or MacCulloch & Wallis. Seemingly brown upholstery must be out of fashion, because I only found one brown fabric, but it was far too red and clashed horribly with the yarns. No worries, though - what am I? I'm a natural fabric dyer! And what do natural fabric dyers do? They TURN STUFF BROWN!



That's a before & after. I didn't bother writing anything down because I wasn't convinced that the fabric was 100% cotton, but if memory serves it was about 200g fabric, 60g onion skins and 10g iron mordant.

The cushion, due to careful planning blind luck, goes well with our other two vintage ones, so here's a nice picture of them together on the sofa.

Onion skins on four different mordants

It's been awfully quiet here at The Laboratory of Dr Me since I was lab-less (or, rather, homeless) during the summer and autumn (bought a flat, all went wrong, etc. etc. - but all ended up fine in the end). All of my materials for making things brown were in storage. We were reunited at the end of the year and I just managed to get one experiment in before 2011. My idea was to test one dye extraction (onion skins, of course!) on four different mordants: alum, tin, copper and iron. I decided against trying chrome for reasons discussed in my previous post.

The easiest way to do an experiment such as this one is to mordant each hank separately and then chuck them all into one big dyebath together to dye, and this is the method recommended in most books and websites. In my very first dyeing experiment, though, I found that you get a lot of colour contamination when you bathe hanks together - in particular, iron (which will darken onion skin dye drastically) is likely to drag down all of the other colours. So I dyed the hanks separately - which, of course, takes longer. In fact this experiment taught me two main things: firstly that mordants can indeed produce a lovely range of dramatically different colours, and secondly that four dye lots in one day is way too much. I think it took about 9 or 10 hours all in all.

Fabric: 4 x 100g wool
Dyestuff: 132g onion skins (4 x 33g)
Mordants:

• 8g alum (potassium aluminium sulphate) with 7g cream of tartar
• 2g copper (copper sulphate) with 10ml cider vinegar
• 7g tin (stannous chloride) with 8g cream of tartar
• 5g iron (ferrous sulphate)

First I boiled up 132g onion skins. Do you know how much that is? I do. It's loads.



I have two dyeing pots (never use a pot for food after you've used it for dyeing) so I did the mordanting and dyeing in two stages. First up were alum and tin. I've used alum a dozen times before but wasn't familiar with tin. My usual approach with alum is to dissolve it in a pint of hand-hot water before pouring this into the cold bath. I tried the same with the stannous chloride, which completely refused to dissolve in the hand-hot water. After stirring for ages I gave up and dunked it into the bath. The result: big bad precipitate.



What the hell! Put the yarn in anyway. The precipitate then settled on the yarn, rather like a snow globe. I wonder if this will lead to patchiness?, I wondered. And did it? Hint: yes.



The tin mordant dissolved beautifully by the time the temperature got up to about 70 or so. If you're planning to work with tin, I'd recommend dissolving it on the hob in the dye pot, then adding cold water once it's dissolved. At least, that's what I'll try next time.

Dyeing the alum & tin hanks held no surprises. It all went orangey as expected.



Next stage: copper and iron mordants. These behaved much like alum - dissolving easily in the hot water. But I don't think I'd appreciated how strong their own colours are. Here they are, five minutes or so since the yarn went in:



Here's the yarn after leaving the copper mordant bath:



And here's the other hank after leaving the iron mordant bath:



That hasn't even touched the onion skins yet. Of course, when it went into the dyebath its colour deepened a lot, as is the way with iron.

Here are the hanks drying over my bath:



And the finished balls of wool.



And what a lovely palette they make. The tin-mordanted wool, while definitely a lot patchier than the others (hard to see in the photo) is such a stunningly vivid orange - I had no idea that tin's brightening effects were so dramatic. It is definitely a bit scratchier than the alum, though, and that makes sense since tin is known to make fabrics brittle. I've heard that you can add a little tin to an alum bath to brighten the colour, which is definitely something I'll be doing in the future. Tin mordant is far more expensive than alum, so it's a good choice economically as well as practically.

Now I just have to decide what to make with these!

The (pseudo)science of chrome

"I don't think I want that jumper. I don't like synthetic fibres. I checked the label and it's viscose."
"Viscose is natural. It's made from wood pulp."
"Really? Wood pulp? I had no idea, I thought it was synthetic."

What do we mean when we say that something is natural? In common use it seems to mean that it has been obtained from plants or animals rather than a laboratory. The problem with this usage is that nothing is made from nothing: in the lab, scientists are extracting compounds from raw materials found in or on the earth, which are clearly natural. Which means that, using this definition, everything is natural: cotton, wool, viscose, polyester, metal, plastic, televisions, cars.

Of course, what people really mean when they use the word 'natural' is gentle, unprocessed. The shampoo bottle assures us that its contents are '100% natural' meaning that they'll do us no harm. This is ludicrous: poison ivy and deadly nightshade are 100% natural but I wouldn't recommend rubbing either into your scalp. This vague, hand-wavy use of the word is part of our society's general misunderstanding of science, and equating the word 'synthetic', or, even worse, 'chemical' with 'damaging' demonstrates how science-phobic we have become.

I've become bothered by this lately and it all started when I decided to do my most recent dye experiment (photos to follow once the yarn's dry) - one dye extraction on several different mordants. My original plan had been to attempt five mordants in total, being alum, copper, tin, iron and chrome. I read up on each on the internet and found that chrome is the source of a great deal of controversy. Briefly, it's supposedly a health risk (breathing problems, skin irritation, carcinogenic etc.) and shouldn't be poured down the drain for environmental reasons.

Possible health risks and environmental risks should give any sensible person pause. It's one thing to expose yourself to a tiny amount of something carcinogenic, but it's quite another thing to pollute the environment, potentially affecting those other than yourself. The human race has historically demonstrated itself to be deeply arrogant about waste disposal, whether it's an individual dumping a fridge by the side of the road or a corporation pumping hazardous compounds into the sea. I'd rather not be guilty of this thoughtlessness, but I have questions about chrome mordant that I'd like answered before I get too angry about people's use of it. I understand that it can kill microorganisms in the water purification plants, but so, presumably, can toilet bleach, and even antibacterial soap, both of which we all chuck down the drain the whole time. Are the effects of chrome mordant worse than this? Is it more carcinogenic than, for example, passive smoking? If I chuck a dozen dye lots' worth of chrome mordant down the sink, am I doing as much damage as the chlorine from the swimming pool down the road, or do I not even compare?

Unfortunately, I've been unable to answer these questions, and partially that's because a vast number of sites I've found discussing the dangers of mordants have been packed with pseudoscience and fundamental misunderstandings of chemistry. When a writer misuses the words 'natural', 'chemical' and 'metal', then it's hard for me to take their advice seriously.

I've found one site which seems fairly authoritative, here:
http://sonic.net/~dbeebee/IMDI_new/mordants.html

My understanding is that, while chromium compounds do occur in nature, the chromium VI oxidation state does not, and this is the one used in chrome mordant. This state is known to be dangerous. Until I know better, I won't be using it in my dyeing experimentation.

The conversation with which I opened this post was something I once overheard at a clothes shop. Viscose is indeed formed from wood pulp, but the pulp goes through a chemical change to form viscose. We can trace the manufacture of viscose back to something natural, as we can with everything else on earth. So the next time the cosmetics counter lady informs you that a product is 'completely natural', it's reasonable to reply, 'Well, yes. What isn't?'

Onion skins on cotton cardigan

I haven't posted in forever, which is down to the fact that I lost my camera cable and managed to break my install of Gimp. I still haven't fixed it so I've had to use iPhoto to resize these photos. For the record, iPhoto is a piece of iShit - which is weird since everything else Apple does appears to be ace.

So this was a brand new cardigan which I dyed in February. It was beautifully successful.

Fabric: 170g cotton, fashioned into a cardigan
Dyestuff: 51g (30%) onion skins, mixed yellow and red
Mordant: 42g (25%) alum with 10g (6%) washing soda
Colour modifier: 3.5g (2%) copper with 68ml (40%) white vinegar




Mordanting the cardigan with alum & washing soda...



Boiling up the onion skins...



Bringing the mordanted cardigan up to the boil in the dyebath...



Modifying the colour with copper and vinegar...



The finished cardigan.

Unfortunately, I managed to drop and break my thermometer during this process (bloody PMT!) so I had to guess all the temperatures - although cotton is very resilient so it doesn't matter if you end up boiling it. I shall have to find another thermometer from somewhere. Maybe an armour-plated one, to avoid any future instances of scattering thousands of tiny beads of mercury all over my kitchen floor.

Madder on wool/cotton: take 2

Last time I was here, I said:

I think I will dye the remaining two hanks with madder again, but next time I'll prepare the dyestuff more thoroughly and I'll use alum as mordant. With a bit of luck, I'll get more intense red/pink shades, which should give me four lovely stripes for my armwarmers.

This time, I did exactly this. I soaked the madder for three days in advance and I used alum as mordant. More intense red/pink shades? Well... kinda.

Fabric: 100g wool/cotton (50% wool, 50% cotton)
Dyestuff: 50g (50%) madder chips
Mordant: 16g (16%) alum (aluminium potassium sulphate) with 7g (7%) cream of tartar
Colour modifier: 3g (6%) iron (ferrous sulphate) used on one hank, and 3g (6%) copper (copper sulphate) used on the other

After the mordanting and two hours in the dyebath, I had produced a colour I hadn't anticipated at all: a vibrant, saturated, Sunny-D orange.



Ick! Not my intention at all. Not that there's anything wrong with bright orange, but with the light pink and lavender skeins from last time, this would look clashy and horrible. I'd only intended to post-mordant one of the hanks, but this orange won't do so I changed my mind and decided to use colour modifiers on both hanks. I didn't want two identical yarns, though, so I post-mordanted one with copper and the other with iron - both compounds tend to darken and mute the results of natural dyeing. I used about half a teaspoon of each post-mordant.

At the time (I wish I'd taken a photo) each hank went a kind of brown - one a brick red and the other more of a rust colour. Both were quite dark, and I was pleased with how much they contrasted with last time's results.

But, during the drying process, the colours transformed into something quite different.



On the left is the alum/iron result, which is marginally browner, and on the right is the alum/copper, which is slightly pinker. But look how light they are - there's no way you'd describe either as 'brick red', is there?

And here they are next to last week's results:



I'm pleased with the fact that the four resulting colours are all very pretty and tone beautifully together, but I'm a little surprised that I got absolutely nowhere near red or maroon with the madder. I'm also surprised by the massive transformation that the colours went through during the drying stage. Having done a bit of Googling, it seems that there are a few explanations and suggestions floating around which could be of use if I try again:

• Lots of sites recommend adding calcium carbonate (chalk) and/or sodium sulphate (Glauber's salt)
• Lots of sites recommend putting the soaked madder chips through a blender, and leaving them in during the dyeing stage
• Some sites recommend not using heat at all, and just leaving the yarn in the dyebath for a week
• Some sites say specifically not to use cream of tartar (although other sites, confusingly, recommend it)
• Some sites recommend taking three hours to get the bath up to simmering temperature - mine probably took more like 20-30 minutes

Seems that madder is quite a tricky dye to get 'right' (if by 'right', you mean 'red'). If you want a vibrant red then the answer, most certainly, is to use cochineal - if you're happy to grind up a few hundred/thousand bugs, which I've got to admit I'm a bit conflicted about. That's hundreds or thousands of lives you're ending for the sake of a hobby, which isn't great; but, then, I guess you end thousands/millions of lives every time you spray antibacterial cleaner round the kitchen and nobody beats themselves up about that. Cochineal does produce some extremely beautiful colours.

Incidentally, I found these two websites particularly helpful for madder dyeing:
http://www.wildcolours.co.uk/html/madder_dye.html
http://www.mannamcarpets.com/dyeM.html

Madder on wool/cotton

I've been looking forward to trying madder for a long time, for a few reasons. I love reds, pinks and burgundies. I like that the root doesn't look remotely red before extraction, so it's one of those magical dyes that doesn't do what you expect. I love its name, because it means 'more mad', and because it reminds me of Madder Rose, an alternative rock band who played Reading in 1993, when I was at the peak of my festival-attendin', NME-readin', grunge-lovin' ways. And I like that it's one of two dyes - alongside indigo - of which people might have heard, or at least might understand when you tell them that it's used to dye the 'pink' (i.e. red) hunting jackets.

I bought four skeins of Rowan wool/cotton (50% of each), which is a lovely, soft, warm yarn. My intention is to dye each skein a different shade of red/pink and then to knit a pair of striped armwarmers using the four shades. In this dyeing session, I attempted two of the four skeins, using iron on one of them to vary the results.

I'd heard that madder works best if you grind it finely, soak it for up to a week before use and extract it several times. I ignored all of this advice because I am (a) lazy and (b) happy to end up with subtle shades.

Fabric: 100g wool/cotton (50% wool, 50% cotton)
Dyestuff: 50g (50%) madder chips
Mordant: 2g (2%) copper (copper sulphate) with 10ml white wine vinegar (10ml vinegar is approximately equal to 2ml acetic acid. You can use less copper sulphate - 2% rather than 20% - if you use 2% acetic acid as well. I only read about this recently, otherwise I'd have done it last time)
Colour modifier: 3g (6%) iron (ferrous sulphate) used on only one of the hanks

I tied my hanks with green cotton. The acidic mordant bath made the white yarn slightly green, and turned the green yarn orange. How peculiar.



After five minutes in the bath, the yarn's colour was disappointingly subtle.



But the colour deepened and developed, just very slowly. After two hours in the bath, it was much more pronounced.



Curiously, sprinkling the iron in didn't plunge the bath into blackness as it usually does. Instead, the bath went from a clear red to a cloudy orange/brown. I gave one hank 20 minutes in the iron-modified bath and then rinsed the hanks. Very little extra dye came out of the yarn.



I think these colours are rather lovely. I would describe the copper-only ball (on the right) as a dusky rose; the copper/iron ball (left) is beige with a touch of lavender. They're very subtle, though, which I'm sure is to do with my failure to prepare the madder properly before dyeing.

What isn't subtle at all is what the acidic mordant bath did to my ties:



I'm very surprised by this. The yarn was boiled up in about three litres of water with just two teaspoons of vinegar and this was the result. True, there was copper sulphate present too, but I've never seen a mordant do this kind of thing before, so it seems likely that the vinegar is responsible. I didn't know that vinegar had amazing colour-changing powers! It's like those felt-tips you had at school that came with a magical white pen to change all the colours. It makes me want to start boiling all of my clothes up with vinegar to see what happens.

I think I will dye the remaining two hanks with madder again, but next time I'll prepare the dyestuff more thoroughly and I'll use alum as mordant. With a bit of luck, I'll get more intense red/pink shades, which should give me four lovely stripes for my armwarmers.

Logwood on cotton cardigan

Dyeing yarn is all very well and good, but you have to go and make something with it afterwards (and I've already started giving away skeins to anybody who looks even slightly receptive). What about dyeing a pre-existing garment? I guess it's more likely to be patchy, but maybe in a charming way.

I recently purchased two white cotton cardigans on eBay for dyeing purposes. One's second hand, one's new. I suspect the new one will dye more evenly - the older one has some pilling under the arms and this could affect take-up of the dye. Let's find out eh?

Fabric: 240g cardigan - 90% cotton, 10% elastane
Dyestuff: 11g (4.5%) logwood (actually I used 50% and added it incrementally, but this is how much I ended up using in the dyebath, so I'll spare you the arithmetic)
Mordant: 60g (25%) alum with 15g (6%) washing soda













Success! My cardigan is a lovely lilac. It is definitely quite patchy - which the photo doesn't show - but it's more a light mottling, giving it a slightly home-made look, which I don't think is a bad thing. The mottling is fairly even over the surface of the cardigan, by which I mean that there aren't darker bits under the arms or anything like that, which would have looked a bit nasty.