Dye batch #2

( account of dye batch #1 )

For my second go at dyeing stuff, I am doing 10 skeins of feza peria bambu linen, about 500g in total. This is at about the upper limit of what I want to try dyeing in my big pot (21qts), I don't think much more would fit! Also every time I pull a skein out of the spaghetti monster mess to rinse and it resolves into a discrete loop I am shocked and awed that skeining works and hasn't turned into a nightmare yet. It really looks like it's all one blob in the pot.

I'm still pre-processing the yarn, we're not actually up to dyeing yet.

Scouring bath:
4 gal water (approx, as full as I could carry without sloshing in the 21 qt pot)
8 tsp sodium carbonate
4 tsp dishwashing liquid soap

Simmered for an hour, then rinsed and started on the tannin bath.

In the first dye experiment I think there were subtler colors I couldn't see on the fabric because of the strength of the tannin brown, so I decided to dial down to 5% tannin (25g), which gave me a plenty brown bath so I don't think it was too dilute. I'm getting the feeling that all of the books I've read, save Rebecca Burgess's Harvesting Color, vastly ovrestimate the amount of chemicals needed, especially if you're going to do the long steep method I'm tending to use on everything (since Jim Liles's The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing, one of the most chemically knowledgeable sources if one of the worst for vast overestimates, points out that mordanting and dyeing all happen at room temperature with cellulosistics). Burgess and a couple of others from this millennium I've read (Sasha Duerr, Jenny Dean) talk about lowering your environmental impact, and that mordanting baths can be saved and reused. There's some implication that you can tell when it's used up, but I don't know how! When I litmus-tested the tannin bath after the overnight 13-hour steep, it was pH neutral, but I didn't think to test it when I started, so I don't actually know if that indicates the yarn sucked up all the tannic acid?

After rinsing the yarn again I started it steeping in a 5% (25g) alum bath. It was pH 4 before I put the yarn it; if it gets to neutral by tomorrow I may do a second alum bath, because 5% is like a quarter of where I started in the first experiment based on my readings. I don't want to overmordant, I don't want to neutralize my damn mordant with sodium carbonate like I discovered folk dyer wisdom urged in every source regarding dyeing cellulose fibers, but I also don't want to undermordant, especially since cellulose fibers don't tend to take natural dyes as strongly as animal fibers.

I have another red cabbage to throw at this batch of yarn; I am thinking I will go for the dark blue color that comes up initially with my pH 8 tap water for most of the skeins, then I will take the skeins out and increase the pH of the dye bath to see if it goes green like last time, if that was a result of the sodium carbonate alone or in combination with the golden color hanging on from the beets in the first experiment. I'll probably give a couple of skeins back to that pot, whether it goes darker blue or surprise green again, just to be able to compare them to the unadjusted cabbage dyed lot. I think I will also try vinegaring a couple of skeins to see if I can get the petal pink. The tannin brown is less strong with this batch, after rinsing my skeins were beigeish, only a little darker than they started, so I have high hopes for being able to dye subtler colors on them.