Dye batch #2
Jun. 8th, 2018 02:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ckmason(account of dye batch #1, copied from a comment where I was telling a friend about it.)
so I was originally going for a red, I was playing with beets. one of my books said you could get a golden color from beets and I was very what? like, from golden beets but the beets i'm most familiar with are red, can full of so red. and I formed this theory, based on i read in one book about navajo dyeing that prickly pears will give you a rose color if you let the fabric just steep for a week, but if you heat it up as is normal when extracting dyes from vegetable matter, it will give you just tan. so i had a theory that beets might be like that, that you might lose the red color if you heated it up but maybe keep it if you just let it cold-dye for a week.
so, I was starting out with a dye material not listed in most of my research and only coming up once as a different thing than I was projecting. this was all SO experimental. Like a lot of my sources told me dyeing with natural materials is super experimental and like stuff changes based on where your plants grow what time of year it is what the weather has been, so many little things, like this is not a straight do A get B process like buying Rit dye or something.
one of my mordants was tannin, because I'm working with plant fibers, my fabric was cotton and cotton/poly in this case, so anyway, tannin mordant, light brown fabric. I figured this was fine I was hoping to get a deep color not a pastel. But yeah, tannin has a color, that's part of this process. I also did alum mordant after tannin, but it precipitated out a lot more than I expected.
so the beets. after a couple of days i got impatient and decided to turn on the heat. I got up to maybe 180F (my dyepot boils slooooow) and the red red water turned orange. I killed the heat and declared it evidence for my hypothesis about the red color getting killed by heat. I added some more beets to get the red back.
then a couple of days later I decided to redo the alum mordanting, because I'd asked ravelry about the precipitation and it turns out that all my books talking about mordanting plant fibers tell you to add washing soda to alum mordant bath because plant fibers don't like acid and the alum mordant bath is acidic, and washing soda/soda ash is the alkaline modifier dyers have on hand anyway since you scour the fabric with it before anythign else. but in balancing the pH, the washing soda neutralizes the alum. That's why it precipitated out. so I figured my first alum mordant bath may not have successfully added any alum to the fabric, and I wanted to try it again, without washing soda (and with less alum, because you need less if you're not neutralizing it right? and then it's not as strong an acid). anyway, when I put my fabric in the alum bath, all hint of the red washed away from the fabric, and i gave up on beets then.
so i decided to try to dye it with red cabbage. Red cabbage will give you different colors depending on your pH, it supposed to give you blue purple in a basic environment or pink in an acidic environment. My tap water runs a pH of about an 8 so I was not surprised that the dye bath initially produced looked dark blue. I simmered that for a bit and the left it to soak overnight (always recommended for getting strong colors, this is so a hobby that requires patience, but at least it wasn't like my original plan with cold-dyeing for a week). my fabric turned sort of a sage green.
so, my fabric I've been saying, I had two garments in the dyepot, one was a cotton bra that had been off-white and I wanted it either more toward my skintone or a very bright color like beet red that would presumably go with at least top I owned. the other was a tank top that had a cotton/poly base and then crochet lace on the front that was 100% cotton, meaning the lace would take more dye than the fabric it was mounted against, which I thought would be a cool effect. it is! it is a cool effect, just not in any color i anticipated.
anyway, the bra was coming out sort of army khaki olive and I didn't like it so I decided to put it in a vinegar bath to try to pink the cabbage dye. The cabbage absolutely pinked, I could see the change in the water the bra brought with it, but the bra itself only got to tannish brown. Maybe the pink wasn't dark enough to show against the tannin. But I'm fairly satisfied with how that ended up. and honestly kind of shocked that the elastic parts of the bra picked up as much tannin as the cotton cups.
I decided to double down on the alkaline with the tank top to try to get the more purple color. when I added my washing soda, the dye water went from dark blue to a really intense like, forest green! I don't know what to make of that at all. Like, I figured the garment was going green in the blue dye water because of either the tannin or the golden color my books TOLD me i would get if I used beets. (the cloth didn't look gold to me at any point, but again, tannin.) but I don't know why the dye water went green when I added more base. potions. i let it soak overnight to green more green. now i'm running stuff through the washing machine and crossing my fingers the top will no longer smell like boiled cabbage when it's done drying.
---
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.
so I was originally going for a red, I was playing with beets. one of my books said you could get a golden color from beets and I was very what? like, from golden beets but the beets i'm most familiar with are red, can full of so red. and I formed this theory, based on i read in one book about navajo dyeing that prickly pears will give you a rose color if you let the fabric just steep for a week, but if you heat it up as is normal when extracting dyes from vegetable matter, it will give you just tan. so i had a theory that beets might be like that, that you might lose the red color if you heated it up but maybe keep it if you just let it cold-dye for a week.
so, I was starting out with a dye material not listed in most of my research and only coming up once as a different thing than I was projecting. this was all SO experimental. Like a lot of my sources told me dyeing with natural materials is super experimental and like stuff changes based on where your plants grow what time of year it is what the weather has been, so many little things, like this is not a straight do A get B process like buying Rit dye or something.
one of my mordants was tannin, because I'm working with plant fibers, my fabric was cotton and cotton/poly in this case, so anyway, tannin mordant, light brown fabric. I figured this was fine I was hoping to get a deep color not a pastel. But yeah, tannin has a color, that's part of this process. I also did alum mordant after tannin, but it precipitated out a lot more than I expected.
so the beets. after a couple of days i got impatient and decided to turn on the heat. I got up to maybe 180F (my dyepot boils slooooow) and the red red water turned orange. I killed the heat and declared it evidence for my hypothesis about the red color getting killed by heat. I added some more beets to get the red back.
then a couple of days later I decided to redo the alum mordanting, because I'd asked ravelry about the precipitation and it turns out that all my books talking about mordanting plant fibers tell you to add washing soda to alum mordant bath because plant fibers don't like acid and the alum mordant bath is acidic, and washing soda/soda ash is the alkaline modifier dyers have on hand anyway since you scour the fabric with it before anythign else. but in balancing the pH, the washing soda neutralizes the alum. That's why it precipitated out. so I figured my first alum mordant bath may not have successfully added any alum to the fabric, and I wanted to try it again, without washing soda (and with less alum, because you need less if you're not neutralizing it right? and then it's not as strong an acid). anyway, when I put my fabric in the alum bath, all hint of the red washed away from the fabric, and i gave up on beets then.
so i decided to try to dye it with red cabbage. Red cabbage will give you different colors depending on your pH, it supposed to give you blue purple in a basic environment or pink in an acidic environment. My tap water runs a pH of about an 8 so I was not surprised that the dye bath initially produced looked dark blue. I simmered that for a bit and the left it to soak overnight (always recommended for getting strong colors, this is so a hobby that requires patience, but at least it wasn't like my original plan with cold-dyeing for a week). my fabric turned sort of a sage green.
so, my fabric I've been saying, I had two garments in the dyepot, one was a cotton bra that had been off-white and I wanted it either more toward my skintone or a very bright color like beet red that would presumably go with at least top I owned. the other was a tank top that had a cotton/poly base and then crochet lace on the front that was 100% cotton, meaning the lace would take more dye than the fabric it was mounted against, which I thought would be a cool effect. it is! it is a cool effect, just not in any color i anticipated.
anyway, the bra was coming out sort of army khaki olive and I didn't like it so I decided to put it in a vinegar bath to try to pink the cabbage dye. The cabbage absolutely pinked, I could see the change in the water the bra brought with it, but the bra itself only got to tannish brown. Maybe the pink wasn't dark enough to show against the tannin. But I'm fairly satisfied with how that ended up. and honestly kind of shocked that the elastic parts of the bra picked up as much tannin as the cotton cups.
I decided to double down on the alkaline with the tank top to try to get the more purple color. when I added my washing soda, the dye water went from dark blue to a really intense like, forest green! I don't know what to make of that at all. Like, I figured the garment was going green in the blue dye water because of either the tannin or the golden color my books TOLD me i would get if I used beets. (the cloth didn't look gold to me at any point, but again, tannin.) but I don't know why the dye water went green when I added more base. potions. i let it soak overnight to green more green. now i'm running stuff through the washing machine and crossing my fingers the top will no longer smell like boiled cabbage when it's done drying.
---
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.
