Tag: natural

A lovely parcel arrived from France!

Cozy Memories goodies

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.

Cozy Memories Scarf

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.

Cozy Memories scarf

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!

Assam Tunic

Assam Tunic

Today I decided to take a day off from doing anything I “ought” to be doing (like packing the house ready for the move), or any kind of “useful” sewing (like more bloomers and summer tunics to wear in this ridiculous heat), and make something that had been nagging at the back of my brain for a few weeks.

This is a silk dupion tunic, with broderie anglais trim and bias tape edging, waiting to be dyed in the tea urn. The stitching is brown because it’s polyester and therefore won’t dye, so I wanted to use a colour that would tone in afterwards. (In future I’ll use cotton thread, but right now I’m using up the stash.)

Assam Tunic

The tunic is elasticated all the way around the waist, under the bust, and around the edges of the top. It wraps over at the back. The broderie anglais trim might be polyester, polycotton at best, so it’ll probably stay cream.

Assam Tunic

It has a fixed, ruffled halter neck, and wrapover back detail. The bias trim is polycotton, and won’t take the dye as well as the silk, so I chose a colour that would still look good with whatever dye it did take up.

Assam Tunic

First dip into the tea urn…

Assam Tunic

The tea itself had been brewing for about two hours. This photo was taken after about another two hours in the tea, and the fabric was already much darker than it looks in the photo! You can see that the trim is still very pale, but the bias binding tones in nicely. The machine embroidery on the trim represents the tea leaves in the dye. (Although I used bags in the urn, as they were left over and out of date.)

Assam tunic

Squeezed out of the tea, the bias trim has taken up the dye nicely, but the broderie anglais is still very pale. The white overlocking on the shoulders is unfortunately on the outside. I had a bit of a moment when applying the broderie anglais, so I made the executive decision that two little white seams on the back of the neck wouldn’t matter too much on an experimental piece.

Assam tunic

Rinsed until the water ran clear…

Assam tunic

Here it is dry, and just waiting for finishing touches. I hung it outside, in the shade so it wouldn’t get bleached by the sun, and it dried at record speed. (I suppose the heatwave has its uses.)

Assam tunic

I added gold ribbons at each side to fasten, and another one in the front for decoration.

Assam tunic

Ta-daa!

There is a little bit of a story behind this piece. The assam tea bags were bought specifically for a reunion with a long-lost friend, about three years ago. Said friend then always seemed to be too busy to come and visit me enough times to actually drink the tea, and we’ve since all but lost touch again. It wasn’t until I came to tidy the kitchen cupboards to sell the house, that I realised the teabags have actually been out of date for eighteen months. Rather than waste them, I thought I’d turn them into something pretty for myself.

Tea Dresses

Tea dyed fabrics

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!

Blackcurrant Dye
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!

Blackcurrant Dye

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.

Blackcurrant Dye

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.

Blackcurrant Dye

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…

Blackcurrant Dye

… 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

Plaintain leaf
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
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

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!

Onion skin dye

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.

Onion skin dye
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.

Oops…

Oops

Two of my soap moulds had a slight disagreement with the dishwasher.

Fortunately, I have plenty more!

I haven’t made any cosmetics for ages, but while I was spring-cleaning the Shed I discovered that I had almost all of the ingredients that I needed to make a few things.

So, I’ve placed an order with Gracefruit, for some exciting new fragrances and the few ingredients I was missing. As soon as they arrive, I’ll be rustling up some bath melts, lip balms and body lotions.