Top Three Posts

Blogger counts each time a post has been viewed and of my 80 posts, the Eco Bundling - OMG post has received the most by far - 102 views and climbing. This post has been viewed almost every day since I posted it! My post Papermaking Adventures: Water Retting is second with 87 views and Experimental Printmaking I (carving into Masonite) is third with 81 views. In general, most other posts get anywhere from 6 to 35 views. I suppose these three topics have very little written about them although India Flint and her eco-bundling technique is getting more popular every day. She has spent much time traveling and conducting workshops and posts on her blog regularly. The popularity of the technique has folks searching for more, I suppose.

To those who have searched for information on these topics, please leave a comment and let me know if you found what I wrote to be helpful and share something about your own experiments and experiences. Thanks!

First Day of Autumn - Summer Lament

In the early days of summer it is heard to believe that it will ever end. The days are long. It is easy to get out of bed at 6 a.m. when the sun is shining and the birds are singing. Energy is endless; activity stretches on until the evening hours when the sun finally sets. The warm sun is encouraging, coaxing me to join it outside. Little by little, autumn approaches. The days get a little shorter. The temperatures begin to cool. It is hard now to get up before 7 a.m. and it is time to pack up the outdoor activity well before 7 p.m.

On the one hand I mourn the endless days of summer and all the opportunities to make paper pulp, experiment with natural dyes, tend and harvest the vegetable garden. I feel that I have run out of time and will not be able to turn all that pulp into paper. Having an outdoor studio is wonderful for so many reasons, but when it gets too cool to keep hands in cold water, I know it is time to pack up for the season.

I am very happy with the amount of time I was able to devote to natural dyeing. I still need to try modifiers on most of the dyed fabrics to see if other colors/shades can be achieved. This can be done inside, so can wait a bit. Once this is done and documented, I will be able to see how many colors were created during this time.

While I do mourn the loss of papermaking days, I look with anticipation to the indoor studio projects that have been on hold. Making books with and printing on the handmade papers, continuing and completing and beginning visual journals, using the abundance of materials in my studio to make collages and mixed media works. Formulating workshops and promoting them. So much planned to do and I know that I will just make a dent in the list! Then it will be spring again, time to plant and cook fibers in preparation for another summer of papermaking and natural dyeing.

To everything there is a season and a purpose under heaven. Thank you, dear God, for all the opportunities you provide to learn and grow and expand in knowledge and ability.

Marigold Dye Results

Here are the results of the dyeing I did with marigold (Tagetes sp.) flowers:

                                                                    

Top Left: alum mordanted cotton 

Middle Left: alum mordanted linen

Bottom Left: alum mordanted cotton in 2nd use of dyebath

Top Right: copper mordanted cotton

Bottom Right: alum mordanted cotton dyed with marigold leaves

(the colors are greener and brighter than they appear here on my computer monitor. the photo was taken under fluorescent lights. I will take another photo in natural light then swap it if it turns out better.)

I also did some eco-bundles with fresh marigold flowers and leaves. These are the results:

Marigold flowers

Marigold leaves

Marigold Dye

Today I dyed cotton fabric with marigold (Tagetes patula varieties). 

 I used flower heads that I gathered and froze last summer and fall as well as a few fresh flowers gathered today. I also made a dye bath with the frozen leaves and stems.

I simmered both for a half hour, let it sit for an hour, then added the fabric.

In the marigold flowers bath are copper-mordanted cotton on the left and alum-mordanted cotton on the right. A better look at the different results from the mordants:

 

with copper mordant

with alum mordant

The marigold leaves yielded a soft green which is difficult to see in this photo. This is on copper-mordanted fabric. I neglected to take a photo of the alum-mordanted.

These are the color results after immediately immersing the fabric in the dye baths. I left them to soak in the baths for a few days to hopefully produce a more saturated color.

Eco Bundling - OMG!

Now that I have completed the work for Inspirations, my first art showing at The Silo Gallery, I have moved on to other projects. Namely papermaking and continuing to experiment with natural dyes and dyeing.

On Sunday afternoon, I mordanted two of the four batches of cotton fabric (old bed sheets) which I treated with tannin back in March (see post here), one batch with alum and the other with copper. I let the batches sit in the mordants until yesterday when I wrung them out, rinsed the copper and half the alum- treated pieces and hung all to dry.

I cut up some of the rinsed, alum treated cotton to experiment with.  I am testing "cold water dyeing" with walnut hulls and oak bark, so a piece of fabric went into a small dye bath of each. Will let those sit for a few days to absorb the most color.

I have been wanting to try "eco-bundles", which India Flint describes in her book on natural dyeing, Eco-Colour.  Now that the fabric was ready, I was able to do so.  I rolled fresh flower petals from Othello roses, pink Pelargoniums, Tithonias, petunias, cosmos, rudbeckias, salvia and catmint. Leaves of woad, orange mint, lemon balm, broadleaf plantain, Lysimachia, sage, beet stems and leaves were also rolled and all were bundled with rubber bands.

These were then steamed for one hour and left to cool overnight.





 India suggests leaving the bundles for a week to let the colors fully develop, but I could not resist taking a peak of each today! And OH MY GOSH how gorgeous that peak is!! I unrolled a few. Here are some photos. We'll see if I can wait a week to unroll the rest!

Othello rose petals

top layer: rudbeckias, cosmos, salvia, catmint (see above)

bottom layer: rudbeckias, cosmos, salvia, catmint

Pelargonium petals

beet stems and leaves

tithonia flowers

As a papermaker and printmaker, you know I will be experimenting with achieving these results on paper!

Soaking and Sowing

Another incredibly gorgeous early spring day (last day of winter, technically)! I worked outside doing "prep" work for the real work (and fun!) that will follow later.

I had been researching sources of tannin for pretreating cotton fabric for natural dyeing. I learned from a fellow natural dyer on the Yahoo Natural Dyes group, that oak bark and oak leaves are a source, in addition to oak galls, which is what the books recommend. This is good news to me, since the leaves and bark are readily available, here, where I live. I filled two 5 gallon buckets half filled with oak leaves in one and oak bark in the other. Filled with water, covered and will let sit for a week or so before straining and adding cotton cloth.

I spent most of the afternoon sowing seeds in trays. Bob just finished building a large cold frame over one of the raised garden beds. It is like a mini greenhouse! I sowed Asian eggplants, basils, tomatoes, woad, calendula, okra, hollyhocks, nicotiana, tithonia and several more seeds. The okra and hollyhocks will be a source of fiber for papermaking as well as a source of formation aid. The woad, calendula and hollyhock flowers are being grown for dye. The nicotiana is for the hummingbirds and the tithonia for the monarch butterflies. Lastly, the eggplants, basils and tomatoes are for dinner!

I should add that the okra, calendula and nicotiana are old seeds (at least six years old), so very well may not be viable.  It is an experiment, just like everything I do. The way to learn is by trying out an idea, often thinking "what if", making observations and taking note.

2012 Papermaking Season Has Begun

It was a beautiful, sunny day today and I was off from work, so spent some time outside straightening up my papermaking studio and setting some fibers to ret.  Mulberry, willow, kozo and gampi bast fibers were each put in a five gallon bucket with approximately six ounces of wood ash and four gallons of water. I put tightly fitting lids on them and placed them in the sun. I plan to give them a stir or tumble once a week for a month. Hopefully April will be warm and sunny so that I can cook these fibers and then beat them. Then the real fun begins!

Mulberry bast with bark

willow bast with bark

gampi

kozo

The mulberry and willow basts were gathered here on our property.  I bought the beautifully clean gampi from Keith Gum of IFUGAO Papercraft. The kozo is from Magnolia Paper.

 I am also reading up on preparing fibers for natural dyeing.  My plan is to dye the cotton sheets first this year, then cut and beat them. This should be easier than trying to mordant, rinse, dye and rinse pulp like I did last summer. From what I read, I believe I need to treat the fabric with tannin (need to find a natural source of that), then mordant twice with alum. Fibers/fabrics can be premordanted and kept indefinitely, ready and available when the dye materials present themselves! I am also planning to use this dyed cotton fabric for weaving and small sewn projects.

2011 Papers

A sampling of the papers I made this summer

Some of the papers you see here are (bottom to top):
14x17 - kozo dyed with forest green Procion dye, Philippine gampi, sage dyed under-beaten cotton, flax, goldenrod dyed cotton
8.5x11 left -  pure cotton rag, cabbage dyed cotton, carrot top dyed cotton, bamboo sheaths, turmeric dyed cotton and abaca
5x7 left recycled paper
8.5x11 right- gampi dyed with colored tissue during pressing of sheets, gampi, purple-leaf plum bark dyed gampi, abaca dyed with dandelion leaves and flowers; sage dyed cotton, goldenrod dyed cotton, carrot top with copper modifier dyed cotton, flax

Garden Sage Dyed Cotton Pulp

I read in the book Eco Colour: Botanical Dyes for Beautiful Textiles by India Flint that the leaves of garden sage make a red dye. This intrigued me and since I have several very robust Salvia officinalis plants, I decided to try it. I believe this must be a misprint. It is more than likely that the purple flowers will yield a red dye. I will try that next June. In the meantime I am very pleased with the sage green I got from these leaves.

leaves before cooking dyed pulp before & after rinsing

the dried, finished sheets

I simmered some of the used dye bath until it was reduced to half. The color is very dark. I believe this will make a wonderful ink.

Cotton Rag Pulp Dyed with Red Cabbage Part 2

L to R: dye before adding mordanted fiber, after; half of each

After seeing some photos of different types of fabrics dyed with red cabbage leaves, I was smitten! The varying shades of purples, lavenders and violets had me hooked! Unfortunately for me, I was working with cotton pulp, not silk or wool fabric.*

I planted three red cabbages in the spring having read that they are good dye plants. I harvested them from the garden on Monday, removed the outer greenish blue leaves, then cut up both the head and outer leaves. I cooked them in separate batches hoping to get two different colors from the same plants. The outer leaves did not yield any color, even after simmering for an hour and a half. The purple heads did release their color in just 20 minutes.

I pre-mordanted the cotton pulp the same as I have been, as recommended for cotton cloth in Wild Color by Jenny Dean. The author suggests using alum and washing soda (as a neutralizer to the acidic alum) to mordant the cotton before dyeing.
I added the cotton to the strained dye bath, brought to a simmer and simmered for 20 minutes. The color of the dye bath seemed to change before my eyes! it went from lavender to a greyish blue to bright cotton candy blue!

I divided the pulp in half and added a small amount of white vinegar to one batch. This turned a magenta color.

On Tuesday I performed the very smelly job of rinsing these pulps. I was sad to see the color being washed out as I did so. I wonder if I had let the pulp sit in the dyebath overnight, rather than draining it right away, would the color have been darker?

blue pulp in vat

Today I made paper from the two batches of pulp. It is difficult to tell the difference between the two because the color is so light!

The finished sheets. Top - pure white cotton, center - red cabbage dye and acid modifier, bottom - red cabbage dyed cotton paper





*Rereading the recipe for red cabbage dye in The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes by Sasha Duerr, I realized that those luscious fabrics were first treated with a tannin and then they were mordanted with alum! I will attempt this recipe again next year. I will pretreat cotton fabric, dye it, wash and dry it then cut it up and beat it into a pulp.

Cotton Rag Pulp Dyed with Red Cabbage Part 1

(Mobile Upload) This is cool! The dye bath color changed from magenta to blue because of the alkaline mordant.

The Finished Papers

L to R: pure cotton; carrot-top dyed; carrot-top dyed with copper modifier; goldenrod dyed

Carrot Tops and Goldenrod

Tools

August 24, 2011 - After spending a few days beating cut up cotton sheets in my Mark Lander Beater, I began the process of dyeing this pulp with plant materials easily accessible to me. The carrot tops I got from carrots I bought at the farmers' market and the goldenrod is growing wild in my backyard.

L to R: cotton pulp after mordanting; carrot tops dye bath; unrinsed cotton pulp

dyed with carrot tops, rinsed pulp with lots of the color removed.

L to R: goldenrod before & after simmering; dye bath

Cotton Pulp for Paper

Today I began cutting up white cotton sheets and beating them in my Critter. I plan to cut up five sheets in all which is seven and a half pounds of dry fiber. After beating this into a pulp, I will experiment with dyeing them naturally. I plan to try goldenrod, culinary sage, carrot tops, tansy, the nuts of Pignut Hickory (a relative of the black walnut), marigolds and whatever else presents itself.