Dyeing in the Garden

We had a lovely day at the Pegg Garden today, dyeing yarn and silk scarves with locally sourced materials.

Fourteen people showed up to play with colour and fibre, and we had beautiful sunny weather for our experiments. I had spent the last couple of weeks preparing dye baths: wood chippings and amur cherry and apple tree prunings (helpfully provided by George Pegg Garden staff), grass clippings (provided by The Boy), thistle and tansy (harvested by me from the ditch), and onion skins and frozen flowers (also provided by the Garden).

The frozen flowers were bundled into a silk scarf before everyone arrived and set to steam, then we chatted about dyeing with plants, and got our yarn into the water baths. We got lovely colours from everything this year!

Then we had our lunch, followed by a tour of the garden led by our intrepid County Horticulturalist, who told us about the kinds of plants we can grow here and showed us samples of many of the ones we were using for dyeing growing right there in the Garden.

While we walked, we harvested materials for the silk scarf dyeing, and then everyone made patterns on their silk and rolled it into a sausage for steaming. We didn’t have enough time to get everything thoroughly steamed, but people could take them home and finish the steaming or leave the bundle to sit for a few days or weeks until the colour develops.

(Yes, that’s a baby sleeping on a blanket under the umbrella. She was an adorable little angel, didn’t cry once the whole day!)

Our yarns came out in fabulous shades – I didn’t get enough pictures, but it really did turn out great. I have more dye bath liquids here at home and some fibre I need to dye for a weaving project, so you’ll be seeing samples soon. The amur cherry prunings gave a really lovely reddish gold that I hope to get more of, and the grass clippings gave more colour than I expected, too! A nice rich brownish green.

I have one more silk scarf steaming now, the one I did for a sample today turned out amazingly well and is at the Garden for show and tell for a little while longer.

… here it is!

It was a lot of fun. Flowers that don’t give much colour in a dye bath extracted for wool can still make fabulous prints on silk, and weeds that you have to cut down anyway make awesome dye baths for colouring your plain yarns. And it’s natural, no nasty chemicals involved, the waste products go in the compost heap … what’s not to love?

Canadian Ecoprinting: leaf print success

We have leaf prints!

Those are amur cherry leaves.

The really intriguing orangey yellow splotch is from a plant called Common Ninebark, which is one of the rose family (so I figured it might make a neat print – which it did). The parts of the plant I used had little flower blossoms on them, and they made fascinating colours!

Below that you can see a mountain ash (rowan) leaf.

So, technique: I put a bit of water in the sink and dropped in two used (very used) tea bags. I swished that around for a bit, took the tea bags out, and soaked the silk scarf for a few minutes. (Tannins help with mordanting, see.) The silk wasn’t pure white anymore, but it wasn’t very much stained by the tea as it had been very weak.

Then I laid out the damp silk and laid my plant leaves on the silk. I covered each section with watercolour paper, as I had read you could get imprints on the paper as well (which I did, see below). Then I layered plastic bags over the paper (some of which had writing on them, which was a mistake, as I have the words “Amur Cherry” imprinted in a sadly obvious spot on the scarf, I’ll have to cut that off), and folded the scarf into a rectangle. This was then steamed over a pot (cookie cooling rack over pot of boiling water, silk package laid on top of that and covered with an upended bowl) for a little bit, then put into a plastic bag sandwiched between two layers of bath towel and squashed under a heavy crock for three days.

I kept peeking, and when I could see that there were prints showing on the silk, I took it out. Amazing! The prints actually darken a little as the silk dries, and I’ll set them with the iron once it’s had a chance to dry completely.

The marks on the paper were also really interesting:

What I wanted most of all was for the layers of silk to be separated from one another, so that I could see the leaf shapes. This wouldn’t work really well if I rolled it into a sausage, because the layers would all smush into each other, so I thought folding it around a resist made the most sense – and why not use a resist that would make interesting prints on it’s own while I was at it?

I also used the frozen rose petals to make some dye: the dye bath came out brilliantly purple, but the resulting dye on the silk was that colour everyone calls “dusty rose” – a very pale almost tea-like shade with just a hint of pinkness to it. On the positive side, the dyebath and the silk smelled fabulous, a huge improvement over dock, which has a really weird mutant pickle smell to it once it gets wet and soggy.

I took the leftover rose petals from making the dyebath and pressed them between two small pieces of watercolour paper, steamed them briefly, and set them under the crock for a few days too. The paper smells just lovely and has some interesting swirly, watery prints on it. I’m curious to see what it looks like once it dries.

Encouraged by the leaf printing success, I took the rose dyed silk out of its dyebath and layered it with poplar, wild rose, and saskatoon leaves, since those are the plants I have in abundance around here. It’s been folded around plastic resists (no watercolour paper this time, and no ink on the bags) and is being squashed by the crock. I think the two step process should be very interesting – I actually don’t recall if I tea-dunked that one as well, but I think I did.

I also made a dyebath out of some frozen blue flowers, and we did get a lovely blue solution, but the yarn I stuck in it didn’t change colour – though the dyebath did exhaust. Or maybe the colour just faded out of the water, I don’t know. I didn’t have many flowers to start with so perhaps that’s part of the issue.

Anyway, we are making headway with the ecoprinting experiments … I can’t wait to do some more!

There is still room in the workshop at the Pegg Garden on August 25 … more info here!

Ecoprinting, Canadian style

I’ve been working on some test ecoprints, as there is a workshop coming up in August at the Pegg Garden and I need to have some examples to show – and I need to know which plants will give us good results, too!

I’m basing my experiments on the information in India Flint’s wonderful book Eco Colour. The book is fabulous, but the author is based in Australia and our plants are, of course, quite different from the ones she has available.

This means experimentation is required. Oh, how tragic. ;)

Experiments with leaves and plain, untreated cotton were disappointing. Cotton really does require pretreatment to take up colour from plants very well, I see. I’ve got some more pieces of cotton that are being soaked in some premordanting, and then we’ll see how they work out.

Silk, though … silk loves plant colours. Silk is easy to dye: just put the plants on the fabric, wrap it up in a tight sausage shape, dampen the whole thing and leave it in a plastic bag for a month or so.

I bundled up a bunch of plants in silk while I was in Ontario – pictures are here. I was going to leave it bundled until the workshop in August, but the colours were very clearly set and I was worried that the plants might start to rot in our warm weather so I unbundled it today. Also, there is some treatment required for it to look good, and I wanted to have something pretty to show people who might be considering attending the workshop, and so … unbundling happened today.

Here’s what it looked like before I unwrapped it:

You can see that the silk has turned many shades of brown, and that the string it’s wrapped up in has been dyed completely chocolate brown.

Unrolled, you can see that the leaves and other plant bits have indeed turned into slimy bits, for the most part. There were still pinecones and chunks of cedar, and some of the maple leaves were “peelable” but mostly, the plant stuff had just disintegrated.

I brushed off what I could, and spread the cloth out on the floor:

See that green? That’s a maple seed: it sprouted! I stuck it in some dirt, I dunno if it’ll grow, but it’s worth a try.

The next step is to let it dry and press it with a hot iron and a pressing cloth.

The colours are set by the heat, and the longer I can leave it now before washing, the better the colourfastness.

I unwrapped another small piece of silk that I had rolled up a few days ago, this one had ‘ditch weeds’ in it: clover, dandelions, alfalfa, vetch, and some yellow something or other that grows in the ditches here. I only left it for a few days, dampened and rolled tightly then put in a plastic bag on a window ledge, and the colours came out quite yellow and green, instead of brown:

There are a few spots where the plants didn’t make any marks, and a few where the purple flowers stained the fabric darker, but mostly it’s an interesting mix of greens and yellows.

Here are the two pieces after ironing:

I think that if I’d unwrapped the Ontario one earlier, I’d have had more greens and yellows – possibly even some purple from the flower heads, but of course I can’t be sure. More experimentation is in order! I did see a couple of small holes in the fabric, so perhaps a whole month was a bit too long, or perhaps something got in there and munched on the silk, I am not sure. I can work around it, of course, but it’s interesting to note.

I have another length of premordanted cotton (with alum and then milk) in the steamer today, it’s wrapped around dock (which is high in oxalic acid) and pineapple weed (which is just interesting), so we’ll see what happens with that – it was looking like there was green and brown coming through as it steamed, so I expect to get some good colour from that. I also have a length of silk wrapped around various leaves (poplar, willow, saskatoon, wild rose) and some weeds (goldenrod, and some small plant with leaves that look like the ones on maple trees), so we’ll see what that does. Both of those got a bit of time in the steamer, and then will sit on the window ledge for a few days until I see signs that they might be ready for pressing.

It’s an interesting adventure, to be sure – I will be at the Pegg Garden on Sunday so I will take some collection bags with me and hopefully pick up some flowers and other plant material so I can do a few more tests … there are some interesting techniques for dyeing with flowers that I want to try!

If you are interested in coming to the Pegg Garden workshop (August 25, 2013) you can register by contacting the Garden – information is on the right hand side of their web page, here. Hope to see you there!

Ontario Silk Ecoprint Project

In August I’ll be doing an ecoprinting workshop at the Pegg Garden, and I need to have some samples to show of what happens when you wrap plant material bits in fabric make the plant dyes transfer and print patterns on the fabric.

India Flint talks about these processes in her book Eco Colour. She also described picking up little bits and pieces of things when she travels in order to make ‘souvenir fabric’ from her journeys, and I was inspired to try this out on my trip to Ontario. I’ve gathered up all sorts of bits and bobs, including some lovely large maple and oak leaves, a bit of seaweed type stuff growing in the lake, a few pinecones, some shreds of rotting tree stumps. When we were at the marina, the gardening crew were clearing out the dead flowers from the hanging baskets and I got a handful of pretty blossoms from the trimmings, and we found some really interesting things along our walk in the woods yesterday.

All these eco treasures were packed home and spread out on a piece of raw silk (we also went to the fabric store yesterday and found one bolt of a lightly textured raw silk), like so:

There’s all sorts of neat stuff on there.

The whole thing was then rolled up into a sausage, wrapped with string, and dampened.

The little mummified plant bundle will be allowed to sit, damp, until the workshop in August. I’ll keep it moist (it’ll get wrapped in plastic for the trip home) and probably set it on a warm window ledge when I get home. I could steam it, but this one is going to be an attempt at the completely cold-bundled process … just plants, silk, moisture, and time.

Guess we shall see what we get in a couple of months!