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.

Onion hat

Made from yarn dyed with onion skins, and logged in this post. I held the two yarns together (with and without iron) to get the mottled look.

At the time I claimed I'd knit a hat 'when I next have a couple of free evenings'. Took me a bit longer than that - I dyed the yarn at the end of July - but the timing's perfect since it's just turning cold here in London. On the walk home from work this evening I decided that it's definitely woolly hat weather.

Next up is a pair of armwarmers with fold-back mitten tops. Like these ones.

Onion skins on wool/cashmere/microfibre

A good friend of mine, Dr H (who can legitimately lay claim to the title 'doctor', unlike myself), has been following this blog and expressed her interest in joining me for a dyeing session. She came over to my flat on Saturday, bearing three balls of yarn, a bag of onion skins and a carrot cake. The yarn and onion skins were useful in the dyeing process. The carrot cake was not, although it had many other appreciated qualities.

To prevent this dyeing experiment from being too similar to my previous onion skin posts, we used copper mordant, which I've never used before, and some unusual starting yarn: the truly gorgeous Debbie Bliss cashmerino in white and bubblegum pink.

Fabric: 75g cashmerino (55% merino wool, 33% microfibre, 12% cashmere), white and bubblegum pink
Dyestuff: 35g (47%) onion skins, mixed yellow and red
Mordant: 15g (20%) copper (copper sulphate) with 4g (5%) cream of tartar

The dyeing process was exactly the same as my first post, with a bit more cake-eating between the various stages.





The result was a beautiful, warm fawn/beige colour. The yarn that started out pink ended up a slightly pinkier fawn, as you can see in the photo, but the difference between it and the white yarn was surprisingly subtle.

Here's the new fawn yarn compared to the cotton I dyed with onion skins in this post:



As you can see, this time the yarn ended up slightly redder, paler and much less saturated than in the previous lot. I suspect the main reason is the use of copper, rather than alum, as mordant. Also, I would expect the results to be paler since the yarn is a natural/synthetic mix rather than a pure natural.

The newly-beige cashmerino has gone home with Dr H who will be adding it to her own yarn stash.

Logwood on wool - second attempt

After my last experience with logwood (aiming for lavender, getting black) I thought I'd try again with a much weaker bath. Last time was 50%. This time I went for 12% but then only ended up using 4%, as you will see below.

Fabric: 100g wool
Dyestuff: 4g (4%) logwood chips (this is an estimate: I started with 12% but threw away two thirds of the dye, as you will see below)
Mordant: 24g (24%) alum

So I started out with the intention of using a 12% bath. After weighing out my 12g of logwood and chucking over some water, the bath looked promising - much lighter than my previous effort. I could see to the bottom of the pan.



I dutifully boiled up the chips for half an hour and then drained them off. I was left with about three pints of liquid, which I topped up to six pints (to fill my plastic bowl) with water.



At this point I felt a bit less confident. The bath was looking very dark again - but could 12% really be too strong when they suggested 50% in all the books? I could've just gone for it but I really didn't want another ball of black yarn, so I snipped off a tiny bit of my wool (a very beautiful superchunky wool from Texere called La Crème) and dipped it in the logwood extract. I wiggled it around for a few seconds, then rinsed it quickly under the tap. Is this a good indication of the final colour? Probably not, but it might serve to give me a vague idea of its intensity.



Right, well, that's very dark indeed, and it's only been in there five seconds - clearly the bath is still way too strong. So my decision was this: I would measure out two pints of this dyebath (a third, hence 4%), dilute it with lots of water and use this as my dyebath. If, after a couple of minutes, the wool's colour was looking too subtle, I would chuck in another pint of logwood extract - and so on until I'm happy with the colour.

So I prepared my 4% bath and chucked in my wool:





The colour wasn't subtle at all so I ended up chucking away the remaining logwood extract. It seems that 4% - rather than the recommended 50% - is a good amount, and I was feeling very pleased with the process at this point. Even more pleasingly, the dyebath cleared during the dyeing.



This was even more cheering since, during my last attempt with logwood, I must have rinsed the yarn twenty times and there was still purple dye coming out of it, although it flatly refused to get any lighter as a result. The clearing of the dyebath is a very good sign that the dye has properly stuck to the yarn.



(It looks like a tiny ball of wool - it's not - it's just massively fat yarn!)

So this was very successful indeed and the resulting yarn is a beautiful colour, hooray! But I have questions - or, specifically, one question. How come all the books recommend a concentration between 12 and 50% when I found that 4% gave a medium purple? The only answer that makes any sense to me is that my logwood is ground finer than theirs; a larger surface area would definitely make a difference. I reckon that 2-8% is more like it, depending on whether you want a light lavender or a deep, rich purple.

Now I'm wondering what I can make with one ball of superchunky wool. A scarf would be good but the yarn is a little scratchy for that (I'm a wool wimp). I might attempt a hat, or perhaps a big woolly earwarmer. Suggestions gratefully received!

Paper marbling

Paper marbling isn't natural fabric dyeing, which means I've gone off-topic already, hooray! It does have some things in common, though:

• It uses alum as a mordant to stick the pigment to the dyestuff/paper.
• It's home chemistry, and you get to feel like a scientist in your very own kitchen.
• It involves tweaking concentrations of various solutions in order to maximise the aesthetic qualities of the results.
• It's fun.

Over the course of Sunday afternoon we marbled about 20 sheets of paper and used three loads of size. The size we used was Deka Marble Medium and we found that 17g - not 10g as the packet suggested - per 2 litres of water gave the best viscosity.

Here are some photos I took. You can see our rubbish low-tech combs if you look closely!

Happiness is...

... a place called Texere Yarns.

Logwood on wool

Logwood (Haematoxylum campechianum, thank you Wikipedia) is a tree from Central America. Its name means 'blood wood' for reasons that will become obvious. It is a wonderful and powerful purple dye and can produce extremely beautiful lavender shades. Unless, like me, you mess it up completely.

Fabric: 200g wool
Dyestuff: 100g (50%) logwood chips
Mordant: 48g (24%) alum (aluminium potassium sulphate)
Colour modifier: small pinch, say 0.5g (0.5%) iron (ferrous sulphate) used on only one of the hanks

I started with some cream-coloured yarn from Rowan - Aran Pure Wool I believe. Lovely big squishy fat soft yarn. I'd generally go for white but cream's fine.



I bought my logwood chips from the fabulous fibrecrafts.com. It's a wonderful, wonderful website, stacked with dyestuffs, mordants and tools, and supplies lots and lots of other crafts apart from natural dyeing. I've recently placed an order on there for some paper marbling supplies - I may well share my marbling experiments on this blog.



As soon as the logwood chips touched water, the dye started seeping out from them - a bright, saturated magenta, much like Calpol. I wondered at this point what to do next. With onion skins you boil them up for 45 minutes to extract the dye, so is this necessary if the dye seeps out all by itself? I wasn't sure, so I did the extraction, which may or may not have been my mistake.







So far, so good. The dye seemed rather redder than I'd expected (I was aiming for more of a bluey lavender than a blood red), but you have to embrace happy accidents with natural dyeing - plus the blood red is a beautiful colour, so I wasn't complaining.

The trouble started when I dropped my mordanted yarn in there.



That's not blood red. That's not even purple. That's black. Black black black. As Spinal Tap would say, "The question is, how much more black could it be? And the answer is none. None more black."

I'd done a lot of reading on logwood before I started this experiment, and everything I'd read had said that logwood produces a light or bright lavender/purple, but plunges very suddenly down to black as soon as you add iron or copper as a colour modifier. Fine, but I hadn't added either at this stage. So what's going on?

After a while, the pot had started to bubble a bit, and the bubbles were almost exactly the colour I'd expected the yarn to be: a bluey lavender.



I did end up adding a tiny sprinkle of iron to one of the hanks. My reasoning at this point was that the yarn was essentially black, so it didn't really matter any more whether I added a darkener or not - but I might as well, in the name of experimentation.

The resulting balls of yarn are very very very dark purple. Black in most light, slightly violet when the sunlight catches them. Black in artificial light.



So what went wrong? I'm honestly not sure. One theory is that, somehow, I managed to contaminate the dyebath with copper or iron. I don't know how this could have happened, but I guess it's a possibility. Another is that my recipe is wrong and a 50% dyebath is just way, way too strong - I've found a website (the lovely True Fibers) which says to use "12-50%", although I'm wondering if 5% is more like it. A third theory is that there's something about my logwood, like it's ground much finer than usual or something, which I guess would greatly increase the surface area and therefore cause a much stronger bath than I'd intended.

Not that my resulting yarn isn't lovely - it is - but it's just far, far darker than any examples I've seen in books or online. I have a second bag of logwood chips so at some point I'll have another go with something like a 10 or 12% bath - I'm now even more determined to get a good lavender.

Oh, incidentally - my pan was heavily stained purple after all of this. I tried bicarb to get it off, but it had no effect at all. Then I tried my new friend, washing soda, which zapped it straight off. Yay! It really does do everything.

Books on dyes

Incidentally, I have a few books on natural dyes. My favourite one is 'The Craft of Natural Dyeing' by Jenny Dean.

Amazon link

Onion skins on cotton

Another go with onion skins before I move on to the fancier ingredients (which I'll have to do since I've now completely emptied my shoebox full of onion skins). My main aims for this dye job were threefold: to figure out dyeing plant fibres (quite different from animal ones), to work out whether my last one went patchy because I soaked two different hanks together, and to use iron without turning everything completely black.

Fabric: 100g cotton
Dyestuff: 45g (45%) onion skins, mixed yellow and red
Mordant: 25g (25%) alum (aluminium potassium sulphate) with 6g (6%) washing soda (sodium carbonate)
Colour modifier: small pinch, say 0.5g (1.0%) iron (ferrous sulphate) used on only one of the hanks

The way that plant fibres, such as cotton and linen, behave during the dyeing process can be quite different to the way that animal fibres (wool, silk, cashmere) behave. In some ways the process is easier - because you don't have to be anything like so careful with the fabric - but it can be harder to get the dye to take.

First challenge was tracking down some sodium carbonate, also known as washing soda. Washing soda is one of those old-fashioned products like Vaseline, bicarb or vinegar which doesn't seem to have been intended for any one purpose, but over time has been found to have dozens of uses. The back of the bottle says To shift heavy stains from clothing; to unblock sinks and drains; to degrease cookers, pans and barbecues; to soften water for laundry; to remove moss from paths. Crikey! Is there anything it doesn't do? I'm reminded of a Mad magazine feature from years ago about finding other uses for baking soda (to dust for fingerprints; to lubricate noisy corduroy trousers...). Eventually I found my bottle of washing soda crystals at the endlessly useful Robert Dyas and it was only 99p. Hooray!

The best thing about dyeing cotton, as opposed to wool, is that it won't felt. This means you don't have to bother with all that 'put the yarn in cool water and gradually bring it up to temperature' stuff. You can just drop it into boiling water, and when you want it cool you can just throw it under the tap. This does make it all a bit faster.

To scour cotton, you can just boil it, so you don't have to soak it overnight. Unfortunately, though, this doesn't mean that dyeing cotton is vastly quicker than wool because the best way to mordant cotton is to boil it up with the alum and washing soda and - yep - leave it soaking overnight. I was a bit worried here as the alum seemed to react with the washing soda - something white precipitated out of the water and formed a sediment on the bottom. Somehow this felt strange (why are my chemicals not sticking to the yarn?) but I don't think it mattered.

From this part onwards it's all the same as wool. I did notice a significant difference, though - the dyebath didn't begin to clear while the yarn was in there. Furthermore, when I came to rinse the dye out of the yarn, masses and masses of colour came out and I had to rinse the yarn a lot before it ran (nearly) clear. This wasn't the case with the wool, to which the dye seemed to stick like superglue. I suspect this means that natural dyes are more fugitive on plant fibres - I wonder if it will fade faster?

This time I used much less iron than last time. Deciding that my kitchen scales are nowhere near sensitive enough to measure out a gramme or two, I sprinkled a little bit in instead - I'd say about quarter or half a teaspoon, maybe 1g, maybe less. I also made sure to soak and rinse my two hanks separately to prevent iron contamination crossing from the darker to the lighter hank.





Success! No dark iron-contamination patches on the lighter ball this time, and the darker one is nowhere near as dark as with the wool. I'm pleased with these results and now feel prepared to move on to some of the more unusual dyestuffs.

Onion skins on wool

For my first trick, I will be dyeing two hanks of wool with onion skins on alum.

Fabric: 100g wool
Dyestuff: 50g (50%) onion skins, mixed yellow and red
Mordant: 8g (8%) alum (aluminium potassium sulphate) with 7g (7%) cream of tartar
Colour modifier: 1.5g (3%) iron (ferrous sulphate) used on only one of the hanks

Since this is my first dye job, I'll describe it in detail. Future posts will be less verbose.

To start with, I took my two 50g balls of wool and tied them into hanks. The first step is 'scouring' which means getting all of the oils and grease off the yarn. To do this, I put a little splash of washing liquid (non-bio) into a big pot of cold water and soaked the yarn overnight.



After draining and rinsing the yarn, I measured out 50g of onion skins, which is a lot! It nearly filled my stockpot.



I then poured boiling water over the skins (enough to cover, plus a pint or so more), brought it to boiling point and simmered for 45 minutes.





After it had cooled, I strained off the onion skins and threw them away. Note to self: don't squeeze out the water with your bare hands unless you want yellow-brown fingernails for several days afterwards. Marigolds are your friends.

After this I ended up with something that looked rather like a prop from Carrie.



Now to mordant the yarn. This bit is boring, and next time I will do it at the same time as the dyebath preparation. I simmered the yarn in alum and cream of tartar for 45 minutes at 82 degrees. You have to be very careful not to 'shock' the wool by subjecting it to sudden changes of temperature - so bring the temperature up from cold at the beginning, and let it cool slowly again at the end before draining and rinsing.



Next I plonked the mordanted yarn into the dyebath and brought it back to 82 degrees for 45 minutes. This bit's actually quite interesting because you can see the colour come out of the dyebath and go into the yarn, so the water begins to clear.





Next I fished out both hanks of yarn. Note to self: buy some tongs unless you want to burn your fingers doing this. I wanted to try using iron as a colour modifier, but only on one of the two hanks so that I could compare the results. I tried to measure out 1.5g of iron but my scales aren't really sensitive enough, so it might have been a bit more than that. It certainly looked like I'd gone a bit overboard when I sprinkled the iron into the dyebath - below you can see the colour of the bath before and after stirring.





That second photo isn't clear, it's black, but hard to see.

I then returned one of the two hanks to the dyebath and simmered for five minutes longer before fishing it out and leaving it to cool.



Once cool, I soaked both hanks together in new fresh water to help get the last bits of dye out. I suspect this might have been a mistake but am not sure yet - see for yourself:





Now, part of that rather startling colour change is likely to be because I took the first photo under the crazy halogen lights in my kitchen, and the second in natural light. But there was definitely a significant transformation from saturated orange to a kind of tobacco/ochre during the soaking process. There are two possibilities here: either it just always happens - the colour matures for a few hours after it's left the dyebath - or it's because I sat it in water with the iron-modified hank. After all, there was bound to be some ferrous sulphate left on the darker hank, which could well have made its way over to the lighter hank while they soaked. The patchiness of the lighter ball would support this theory since maybe bits of it that were closer to the darker hank picked up more iron... maybe? Not that I mind since I like variegated yarn, but I wasn't expecting it since I did lots and lots of stirring throughout the whole process.

My other main observation is that the yarn did shrink an awful lot, both in length and width. It started out as... erm... DK I think, possibly aran weight, but now it looks like 4-ply. I think I might try to get superwash chunky wool for future experiments. Maybe cotton wouldn't shrink as much?

Next time I will soak and dry the hanks separately. I will also bother to put on my rubber gloves more often - to avoid the stained fingernails - and I will buy a pair of tongs. But I am pleased with my first experiment. I think I will twist the two yarns together and knit a hat, when I next have a free couple of evenings.