dyeing – eternal magpie

Making Do and Mending

Well, isn’t this irritating? One freshly-dyed white t-shirt (Dylon Rosewood Red, not as lurid as it appears in these photos!) complete with stain that, annoyingly, wasn’t visible when the t-shirt was white. Now that the t-shirt’s dyed I can’t use a stain-removal product or scrub at the fabric, as that will most likely take off the dye as well as the stain. My only option now is to cover it up with something.

That’s better! A bit out of focus, but these are floral motifs carefully snipped from a small piece of Lancaster & Cornish organic cotton lace. I’m hoping there might be just enough loose dye still in the fabric that a little bit of it leaches out into the lace the next time it’s washed, just to soften the cream colour a little bit. But if that doesn’t happen, no worries, because the cream lace makes the white stitching on the t-shirt look as bit more as though it’s supposed to be white on purpose.

Knowing that the stitching wouldn’t take the dye was the main reason I chose the colours I did for dyeing my trousers – beige to dark brown, and pale blue to dark grey. With the contrast stitching they just look like smart, lightweight jeans. I also have plans for mending all of my funny-coloured trousers in the future. I’m on the look-out for small pieces of Liberty print fabrics that I can use for patching, and maybe for adding a hint-of-a-print on the turn-ups. Hopefully that will be a long way off yet though!

While I was mending things, I made the decision to take two of my most beloved t-shirts out of my wardrobe. This Suzanne Vega t-shirt is from the very first gig I ever went to – at the Wulfrun Civic Hall in Wolverhampton, on April 8th 1993. (We were sitting three rows from the back, and Suzanne Vega had a cough.) Having been worn pretty often over the past 22 years, although recently relegated to hospital wear or pyjamas only, it’s safe to say that this t-shirt is very much past its best! But there was no way on earth I was going to throw it out, and it’s really not fit to give to a charity shop, so it was the work of about five minutes to turn it into a cushion. The tour dates are on the back.

The same fate befell my other favourite t-shirt, also purchased in 1993, this time from Forbidden Plant in Hanley. I didn’t own any other green clothes, and it was far too big for me (being a men’s size XL), but I just had to have it. It saw me through art college and University, but again, it’s not even really fit to wear as pyjamas any more. But, because it was still in my wardrobe, it kept mysteriously finding its way out and onto my body. Drastic measures clearly had to be taken. So, cushion it is.

(No, I don’t iron my bedding. Sorry, Mum!)

Making these two cushions from my favourite t-shirts has made me wonder though – are there any items in my current wardrobe that I can imagine myself still wanting to keep in 22 years’ time?!

A lovely parcel arrived from France!

Look at all these lovely goodies! I recently entered a giveaway on Facebook, when Sonia of Cozy Memories reached 500 Likes. I was very surprised to find out that I’d actually won – and here’s my prize!

I was expecting to receive the festive Mug Rug, shown at the bottom – a lovely organic cotton coaster with room for a biscuit on the side. I was also expecting the scarf, which I chose with a voucher that was part of the prize. I wasn’t expecting the matching square coaster, the lovely handwritten card, and the delicious tea bag! The scarf came in a lovely hand-dyed drawstring bag too, which looks to be just the right size for storing my tarot cards.

Best of all – everything is made by hand, with natural materials. The linen scarf is dyed with Sicilian Sumac, sourced locally to Sonia, and the colour is a gorgeous grey-toned purple. I had a really hard time choosing which item I wanted from her shop, as everything is so lovely! I was very taken with this zipped pouch, dyed to the same colour and decorated with a ginkgo leaf.

In the end I decided to choose something that I could wear often, and that would fit in with my wardrobe. I have a lot of clothes in variations of black, grey and purple, so this scarf will go with all of them! I especially like the variations in the dye that you can see in the photo above. They add a lovely depth to the fabric, and a reminder of the natural dyeing process.

In the spirit of paying things forward, I’ll be having a giveaway on The Eternal Magpie Facebook page, when I reach 100 Likes. Now I just need to choose something that I think people would actually like to win!

That didn’t go well…

Last night, in my rush to have a piece of dyed fabric to work with today, I brewed up some tea in the urn and threw in a big piece of silk. Unfortunately, I didn’t really think through how much dyestuff I was using compared to the amount of fabric – and the answer turned out to be not nearly enough.

The silk had been in the tea urn all night, but you can see that it came out almost exactly the same colour as it went in. The very weak colour of the dye solution is another clue that it simply wasn’t going to work!

As I was emptying the tea urn into the bath I cleverly managed to kick the spout, which poured scalding water all over the top of my foot. Not my best move ever. It damn well hurts, and I don’t quite know how I’m going to put shoes on to go to work tomorrow. (I don’t have any ballet flats, all my shoes fasten over the instep. Ouch.)

This is the finished colour of the fabric – almost exactly the same as before I started. It does have some rather nice iron stains (an experiment in modifying the dye with rusty nails), but they’re so spread out that they just look like a bit of an accident. Perhaps another dip in the tea urn with a darker dye will make them look a bit more purposeful. You can see below that the fabric has changed colour a little bit… but it’s far, far too subtle for my liking!

I do this often – not the dropping scalding water on my foot, thank goodness, but the mad rush to have something prepared for my one day off during the week. Once a month there’s an odd junction in my work rota where I work all weekend and don’t get two days off in a row that week. My following day off always seems extremely precious (and a long away away from the previous one, even though it isn’t really), and I invariably put too much pressure on myself to get lots of creative work done that day. Sometimes that pressure works really well and I get lots of sewing done (such as the orange jacket I made on Thursday and wore to work on Friday), but sometimes… well, sometimes you get days like today.

The house move is panicking me too, as my new sewing room is also going to be the box room until we can get some flooring put down in the loft, so I don’t know how long it’ll be until I can get everything unpacked. Thankfully my knitting will remain accessible (it’s currently squashed into the storage end of the sofa), and I’ve packed myself an Emergency Craft Box. This contains lots of embroidery, plenty of sketching materials, and lots of small bits and pieces that I never seem to get around to. I might just pop a few bits of needle felting kit in there too. I may not get around to making use of any of it, in all the disruption of the move. But it makes me feel much calmer about it all to know that if I want to, I can.

Felted slippers – part two

Awww. They’re too big! I knew the lasts would be quite roomy around the top, and I do plan to cut these away to more of a ballet pump shape. But still. Too big.

Look how much room there is in front of my toes! The lasts were a size 38/39, but I’d say these have come out around a 40/41. I did toy with the idea of chucking them in the washing machine, to take the hard work out of shrinking them a little bit more, but was so worried about them coming out the right size to fit my two year old niece that I decided against. (Not that I begrudge her a pair of pink felted slippers, but I want these to be mine!)

So, I went back to my long-neglected shoemaking supplies, and have given them rubber soles along with cork-and-fleece insoles. These are now sitting on the deck waiting to dry, while I’m recovering from the fumes from the glue. Wow, that stuff is disgusting. Even wearing a respirator and eye protection, you can still smell it a bit, and it still makes my eyes water. That, along with the terrifying health and safety warnings, makes me think that there must be a better solution than glue. I mean, what’s the point of painstakingly hand crafting a pair of slippers from natural materials… and then whacking four layers of highly toxic rubber cement all over them?

They do need some kind of sole though. On laminate flooring and tiles they’re slippery enough to be absolutely lethal, and of course without soles they can’t be worn outside. Time to go back to my shoemaking books (and maybe a few museums with non-leather shoes?) to come up with some more ideas.

Meanwhile… this is the scene in my kitchen at the moment. Remember I said I was going to take all my frozen tea bags out of the freezer, to make room for ice cubes? Well, I did that, and I left them all out on a table in the garden to dry overnight. Except that, for the first time in weeks and weeks, it rained. It rained A LOT. So now they’re on the kitchen table, drying off again.

I have no idea whether they’ll have any dyeing properties left whatsoever, after the amount of water that landed on them last night! Hopefully they’ll still leave at least a little trace. I’m still not entirely sure what I’m going to dye with them yet, but after a few experiments with the leftovers in the tea urn filled with assam, I’m thinking it needs to be silk for the best results. Which is the one thing, of course, that I don’t have a great deal of in my fabric stash! I might need to make a bit of extra room by sewing up some of the cottons first…

Tea Dresses

It’s a long while since I’ve done any experimenting with natural dyes, but I was thinking about tea dyeing again this morning. This came about because I’ve been saving all of my used tea bags (ordinary black tea and lots of different herbal varieties) and stashing them in the freezer. They’re all in bags, a month’s worth at a time. It turns out that I drink rather a lot of tea, so six months’ tea bags are now taking up rather a lot of space.

The reason I’ve been saving them this way is that I’ve been thinking about a (currently imaginary) project of making “tea dresses”. The dresses would be made from organic cotton, or vintage nightdresses, or maybe old doilies and table linens of various descriptions. Each one would be dyed after its construction, in a month’s worth of tea bags. Theoretically each one would be a different colour, as no two months’ tea combinations would be the same. (Actually, they’ll almost certainly all be beige, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.)

However, something suddenly occurred to me, after watching a detergent advert on the telly.

How do you wash a dress that’s been dyed with tea, when modern detergents are specifically designed to remove precisely this kind of stain?

The Internets provided me with answers ranging from “add salt to the dye bath” to “rinse with a vinegar solution”, and people also suggested washing at various temperatures and with different kinds of detergents.

Conveniently, a friend’s husband is something of a detergent expert (how useful!), and he had this helpful advice:

“Effectively you’re using a tea as a direct dye so it will be prone to fading. But there are a couple of things you can do to help. After you’ve stained the cotton, let it dry and leave it for a few days. The air will help to set the colour a bit. You could also experiment with a hand wash in bicarbonate of soda which will darken the colour somewhat (alkali does that to tea for the same reason that it gets lighter when you put lemon juice in it). From a detergent point of view, we rely strongly on bleach to get rid of tea so avoid powder detergents and detergent additives such as Vanish. Then wash on a cool short cycle and you will create unfavourable conditions for tea removal. Just don’t spill coffee down yourself ;)”

Fantastic! So another friend’s suggestion of using a rubbish detergent (as she never manages to get stains out of anything, apparently) is a good one, as is only washing in cool water. The bicarb/alkali information is very interesting, and I happen to have some litmus paper in the Shed that I can use to find out what sort of pH produces good results in terms of both colour and fastness.

I know that these dresses will fade over time, and to me that’s going to be part of their charm. I plan to make them fairly plain, and then embellish them as I go along, so they’ll effectively remain a constant work in progress. I might even keep collecting my tea bags, and re-dye them once a year.

You all know what I’m like for getting all excited about a project and then wandering off before it ever gets past the imaginary stage, but I should probably actually try to make a start on this one soon. Not least because I don’t really want to have to explain to the removal men why I’m moving six months’ worth of frozen teabags from one house to another!

Natural Dyeing: Blackcurrant Surprise!

silk dupion, silk paj, silk noil, bamboo, cotton muslin

Surprise, because grey really wasn’t the colour I was expecting to get from blackcurrants! I’m completely amazed by the difference between the colours on the protein-based silks, and the cellulose-based bamboo and cotton.

This one was a bit of an experiment using more of Sarah‘s leftovers – this time some blackcurrant pulp that had already been cooked. I decided to try out my new and exciting Ebay-purchased tea urn, so I tipped the blackcurrant mush into a nylon mesh laundry bag and chucked it in. As well as about 6 litres of water, I also added a litre of out-of-date blackcurrant, pear and apple juice. Well, it seemed better than just pouring it away!

I left the liquid and the blackcurrants in the tea urn for about two hours – one to warm up, and one to cook the blackcurrants and release the dye. It came out a bit cloudy, because of the fruit juice, but a pretty colour!

At this point I also added some salt, as a fixing agent. The only salt I had in the cupboard included an anti-caking ingredient – E536, or potassium ferrocyanide. I suspect this has affected the colour a little bit, probably pushing it slightly towards the blue end of things.

At this point I threw in the fabric, and gave it all a good stir. I left the tea urn switched on for another couple of hours which, in hindsight, was a mistake. The temperature was too hot for the silk, and it’s lost its sheen a little bit. Next time I’ll heat up the plant matter to make the dye, then switch off the urn as soon as the fabric goes in.

This is what came out of the urn – exactly what I’d expected! A metre and a half of cotton muslin, in a beautiful pink. So you can imagine my surprise when I turned on the shower, began to rinse the excess dye away, and ended up with this…

… a beautiful piece of delicate grey cotton, with no pink left in it whatsoever!

There’s enough here to make three scarves, one of which I will most definitely be keeping for myself. I wear a lot of grey, and I can just imagine decorating the ends of this with some smoky quartz beads for a bit of added sparkle.

It was very peculiar though, watching that beautiful pink colour just wash away. Not a disappointment, by any means, but definitely a surprise!

Hapa-zome

Ribwort plaintain leaf

Today I have been mostly hitting plants with a hammer.

As you do.

It’s a technique called “hapa-zome”, coined by India Flint, that literally means “leaf dye” in Japanese.

Using a few sheets of thin cardboard to cushion my work table, I laid out a small piece of silk paj, and placed the plantain leaf on top. The silk was folded in half, leaving the leaf sandwiched in between. I popped a plain sheet of paper over the top… and hit it with a hammer.

A rubber hammer is advised, but I don’t have one of those, so I used my leather jeweller’s hammer instead. The trick is in hitting the leaf hard enough that the colour transfers onto the fabric, but not so hard that it turns into mush and gets stuck to the silk.

nasturtium petals

The plantain leaf took a fair bit of hammering before I had a nice even print. These nasturtium petals, on the other hand, I barely had to touch. Interestingly, when I peeled them off the fabric they were almost transparent, having been bright orange beforehand. The print they’ve left behind is very soft and faint, almost ghostly.

These prints won’t be light fast, but apparently they should last a good couple of years if they’re not washed too often. I can’t decide whether or not I like them… but I’m keen to bring home some more leaves and have another go.

Onion skin dye

This post is for Sarah, who’s very kindly been saving her leftovers! Paul and I don’t eat onions (weirdly, they burn Paul’s mouth – does anyone else have this?), so Sarah’s been hanging on to her onion skins for me. This looked like a lot, but only weighed about 6g, so I only added small pieces of fabric that added up to about 8g. Judging by the colour of the dye bath, I could have added a lot more!

As with my previous experiments, I simmered the onion skins in almost-boiling water for about an hour, before removing them and adding the wet fabric. I left the fabric simmering for another hour, then switched off the heat and left the saucepan to cool.

Once again, I didn’t use any kind of mordant for this experiment. The colour of the water led me to hope for some really bright fabrics, but the actual results are a lot more muted. I’m definitely going to need to add mordants to my experiments if I want to explore the full potential of the colours available from plants.

Silk dupion, silk paj, silk noil, bamboo, cotton muslin

This time the dye came out rather patchy, and with very marked differences between the fabrics. The silks have once again taken up the colour much better than the vegetable fibres. The bamboo in particular is very pale, especially in contrast to the silk paj!

The next part of this experiment is to keep some of the fabric pieces I’ve dyed so far closed away in a book, and leave others to hang in a window. That will help me to find out how fade-resistant they are. (I suspect not at all.)

Sarah also gave me a big pot full of previously-cooked blackcurrant pulp, which is very exciting! I had intended to try solar dyeing with it, but I don’t think the sun’s come out once today. Maybe at the weekend, when it’s forecast to perk up a little! Failing that it’s back to the big cooking pot, in the hope of coming out with a lovely shade of blue.

Turmeric dyeing experiment

It seems as though I’ve been bitten by the dyeing bug rather badly. I can’t stop thinking about plants I could grow in my garden (coreopsis, safflower, weld, marigolds), or plants I could forage (walnuts, elderberries, sumac), or plants I could ask friends-and-relations to save for me (onion skins, rhubarb leaves).

I’m still working in the kitchen without mordants, so the next obvious step was turmeric. A quick trip to the corner shop procured a nice big bag of spice, and I found these instructions online. I used them as more of a guideline than a rule, as I don’t have a thermometer, and I don’t have any coffee filters to strain out the turmeric powder.

I cut slightly larger pieces of fabric this time, with a total dry weight of 30g. I used 25g of turmeric powder, and the water looked extremely yellow! As before, all the fabric’s been pre-treated by a quick trip through a hot wash, and it was all dampened under the hot tap before putting it in with the turmeric.

Left to right: silk paj, silk dupion, bamboo, cotton muslin

The fabrics started to take up the colour immediately, a beautiful rich yellow. Apparently you can modify this to red with the addition of baking soda, but I wanted to see what colour the pure turmeric would result in first.

As before, I simmered the turmeric for an hour, then added the fabric and simmered for another hour. Finally the heat was turned off and the water left to cool before rinsing the turmeric out of the fabric. I could probably have kept the dye and used it again to create a paler colour – or perhaps tried to modify it the second time around.

An awful lot of colour leached out of the fabrics as I was rinsing them, particularly the cotton and bamboo, but I was still left with nice bright colours.

Cotton muslin, silk paj, bamboo, silk dupion

I hung them out on the washing line to dry, loving the fantastically bright yellows, but bearing in mind the warning that turmeric isn’t terribly light fast as a dye. How bad could it be though, really?

An hour and a half later, I had my answer! You can see the colour change most clearly in the silk dupion (on the right), which has a stripe down it where it was covered by the bamboo as it dried. As a friend pointed out, when you want to shift a turmeric stain it seems to stay for ever, so perhaps the answer is to leave the stained garment out in the sun for a bit…

The colours are still lovely, if nowhere near as bright as they were to begin with. This photosensitivity does limit what I can do with the finished fabric though. I don’t want to go out on a summer day wearing a bright yellow scarf, and come home wearing a white one!

Tea dyeing experiment

I’ve been reading a lot of books and blogs about dyeing fabric with plants lately, and I wanted to do a little experiment. But chemical mordants seemed a bit complicated and scary, and I don’t yet have a dedicated saucepan just for dyeing, and I wanted to get started straight away. So, inspired by Tiina Teaspoon, I decided to start with tea!

Tiina recommends freezing your used teabags until you’ve got enough to dye with, which I’m going to start doing from now on, but tucked away in the back of the cupboard I knew I already had a box of decaffeinated tea bags that had gone out of date. I started with 16g of dry fabric (silk paj, cotton muslin, bamboo and silk dupion) and 17g of tea, or five tea bags.

I filled a saucepan with hot water, and simmered the tea bags for an hour. Our water here is very hard and full of lime, and there was a lot of scum on the top of the tea. I did wonder whether I should have used distilled water, but not having any to hand, tap it had to be. I took out the tea bags before adding the fabric. All of the fabrics had previously been through the washing machine to remove any starches or other treatments left over from the manufacturing process (including the silk), and I soaked them in warm water before putting them into the tea.

The resulting brew was very dark, and the fabric began to take up the colour immediately. If I just wanted to dull down a piece of cotton, or create an “antique” look, I wouldn’t have needed to do much more than just dip the fabrics into the tea.

In the end I let the pot simmer for another hour, by which time almost all of the water had evaporated. Possibly I should have left the lid on the pot, and turned the temperature down even lower. The water really only needs to be kept hot for this, not actually boiling. After the hour I turned off the heat and left the fabrics in the tea dye to cool down. I kept stirring the fabrics around throughout the entire process, maybe every fifteen to twenty minutes or so. (Every time I walked through the kitchen. I wasn’t very precise about it!)

From left to right: bamboo, silk paj, cotton muslin, silk dupion

I rinsed the fabrics under the shower until the water ran clear, which was actually very quickly. I didn’t use any detergents, just warm water. I knew the cellulose fibres (bamboo & cotton) would take the colour differently from the protein (silk) ones, but I’m suprised at the depth of colour and the variations between them all. The fabrics are still a little bit damp in this photo, so the dupion has dried a little bit paler, but the two silks have kept their shine, and the colours are just lovely.

I’m now on the lookout for more plant dyes that can be used without any additional chemicals to fix the colour or release the dye. In the meantime I have plenty of tea in the house, so I can feel an experiment coming on!

Tag: dyeing

Making Do and Mending

Like this:

A lovely parcel arrived from France!

Like this:

That didn’t go well…

Like this:

Felted slippers – part two

Like this:

Tea Dresses

Like this:

Natural Dyeing: Blackcurrant Surprise!

Like this:

Hapa-zome

Like this:

Onion skin dye

Like this:

Turmeric dyeing experiment

Like this:

Tea dyeing experiment

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: