Dying with Black Beans

August 25, 2011 ~ madgeface ~ Leave a comment

Dying with black beans? Really?

Yes. Really. I read it on the internet. And I have a friend who tried it (hookedferret/silverdragon). And I’ve seen pictures with a range of different results, from blah gray to brilliant blue to deep amethyst purple.

Here’s what I did: soaked 2lbs of dried Goya brand black beans in tap water in a covered stainless steel pan at room temperature for two days. I strained the beans out and saved the water, cooking the beans in the crock pot for some black bean cakes (never had them, can’t wait to try) and soup and chili (2lbs is a lot of beans). In the mean time, I popped my sample skeins (all Lion Brand Fisherman’s Wool), a hat I made last year of hand spun alpaca (it’s the oh-so-fun-to-knit Caera hat), and some roving (already dyed a pale green during the natural dye class) into a dye-only-pot with the bean water.

Being the impatient person I am, I heated up this bean-smelling mixture to the steam-but-not-bubble point and then left it for a day. The results:

I think the most striking results are in the cotton I used to tie the test skeins; all of them started out white, as they are in the un-dyed skein on the left. Next, unmordanted wool that’s the color of dirty dishwater, but the cotton ties are a bright sky blue. Next, alum-mordanted wool – a darker gray with hints of blue and denim-blue colored ties. Finally, an iron-mordanted skein that’s deep dark gray with navy blue ties. And the hat – once white, now a purpley gray.

Now the roving:

The yellow is the original dye; I wish I could remember what it’s dyed with or that I had taken better notes or labeled them. The greenish gray are the still-damp overdyed samples.

My results aren’t that spectacular in comparison to others; a simple search for pictures on flickr shows some much deeper, more saturated results. So where did I go wrong?

I think heating the bean water was a mistake, based only on what I’ve read in the natural dye groups on Ravelry. I also think a longer soaking time (for the wool, not the beans) would result in more saturated colors. Also: pre-mordanting with alum clearly results in a deeper color.

I was hoping to have time to get into the science of why heating the beans results in grays (carotenoids, anthocyanins, and other natural pigments), but the phone has rung at least 6 times in the last hour, the doorbell 3. And I’m making dinner, chili because we’re out of eggs. Hoping to write about lichen dye tomorrow, time and interruptions permitting.

Indigo

August 6, 2011 ~ madgeface ~ 1 Comment

A long time ago, in a land not that far away, I got a Jaquard Indigo Dye Kit from Knit Picks. It’s been so long that the product packaging has been updated.

I finally used it by starting an indigo vat in mid-June with hookedferret/silverdragn, my dye buddy and enabler. The kit comes with enough pre-reduced indigo dye 5lbs of material. I think we dyed about 1-1.5lbs of yarn & roving that day. Then she hosted a dye day that I ended up not being able to go to and several of our friends dyed even more yarn and roving. How much? I have no idea. But I knew that I’d probably need to revive the vat when I got it home.

After reading lots of info about reviving a vat, I went to JoAnn’s and got some RIT Color Remover (for its sodium hydrosulfite). I also picked up some soda ash, though I can’t remember if it was to help revive the vat or to scour some yarn that I’ve come to hate so that I could pop it into the vat. On Wednesday, I added a packet of the Color Remover to a cup of water, dissolved it, and gently stirred it to the indigo vat (a white 5 gallon bucket with a black lid), which was a deep murky green and had a bit of mold growing on the surface. A little mold wasn’t going to stop me and it also didn’t smell awful, so I continued.

I also dissolved a packet of the soda ash in a bucket with about a gallon of water and put this in to scour:

This is Veronik Avery’s Cap Sleeve Henley in Debbie Bliss Prima (80% bamboo, 20% merino); details in my Ravelry project page. Mr. Q bought the yarn for me a few years ago and I should have returned it to the LYS but instead have let it sit in my stash. I don’t have anything against this shade of green (note the cover of the book on the table), but I don’t really like to wear it. Or, at least not so much of it all at once. Here’s what came out of the vat:

It’s still a little damp in this picture – the color is even and not blotchy at all. My artsy yarn pr0n shot, taken the next day:

I also soaked 3 skeins of handspun alpaca in water (standard procedure for dying yarn is to thoroughly wet it before putting it in the dye pot). I’d dyed these 3 skeins in the first time go around with the vat, but read that someone found the indigo vat to be even more effective after adding RIT Color Remover. I also thought I’d make the skeins a bit darker; I dipped them twice the first time around and the blue wasn’t as deep as I’d hoped. Here they are, modeled by my sweet helper-dog, the aforementioned Lily:

I’m not sure what else I have around the house that I want to dye with indigo. Anyone local is welcome to come over and use the vat; I even have an extra box of Color Remover & some left-over soda ash.

The best part of dying with indigo is watching things go from an unreal phosphorescent green (similar to my original sweater above but with more oomph) to the final indigo blue. Blue and green are my favorite colors and there were so many shades that green-blue and blue-green and teal that I wish I could make permanent. I have a feeling that I’ll only get those shades with acid dyes, but I’m having more fun being surprised with what I get with natural dyes.

Links to reliable info on indigo:

http://www.aurorasilk.com/info/indigo_tutorial.shtml

Info on indigo and woad from Maiwa

Dandelions

August 5, 2011 ~ madgeface ~ Leave a comment

When I took the natural dye class this spring, taught by Sylvia De Mar through The Art League of Alexandria over the course of 3 Sundays, Sylvia asked us to gather dandelions and bring them in for our last class. She asked for the whole plant – flowers, leaves, stems, roots. I know that dandelions are actually useful in certain circumstances; my first landlords in NJ eagerly awaited spring so they could have dandelion greens. The grandmother of one of my best friends when I was growing up also eagerly awaited spring dandelions and made dandelion wine. Nota bene: it takes a whole heck of a lot of dandelion petals (petals only!) to make wine; here are more recipes than you can shake a stick at.

I diligently uprooted as many dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) as I could find, put them in a ziplock bag, and tossed them in the freezer. Of course, I forgot to take them to our last class. And of course, they’ve waited patiently for me along with other oddities in my freezer, like marigold petals that I’m collecting (copycatting off of hookedferret/silverdragn for another dye pot). I pulled them out today and after defrosting and rinsing them (note to self: rinse the dirt off before freezing them next time), separated the roots from everything else. I remember Sylvia telling us the roots give a different color.

Which brings me to the sturdiness of my methods so far. I should be using dye recipes. And I should be using raw materials in proportion to my wool (yarn or roving or fleece), which means weighing everything. If I were to get really technical, I would test the pH of my water and of my dye baths and manipulate them with vinegar or ammonia. At least I’m dying with several different pre-mordanted samples.

Dye Recipes

I could’ve used dandelion root tea! Or maybe I could taste-test some of the dye bath! Or maybe not. I’ll keep this option in mind for the winter and maybe try other herbal teas.

Other bloggers before me have been just as lax with their methods, except that many of them limit themselves to the flower heads or strictly the petals.

What I Did

I picked dandelion stems & roots (when I could get them out of the ground) in April and froze them until now, August. I should’ve cleaned them & separated all of the non-dandelion materials (crabgrass, oak leaves, stems, pine bark mulch) before freezing, but did get most of that stuff out. I put the stems, leaves, and flowers (308g) in one pot, and the roots only (68g) in another pot, both with enough tap water to let the materials swish around freely. I brought both to a boil and simmered for about an hour. My pre-mordanted samples soaked in rainwater (it was handy) during that cooking process. Here it is in pictures, with results:

Leaves and roots in the pot with water but no cooking time.

After cooking the materials, with samples added & simmered gently for 30mins.

The dull, ho-hum results. But, with an ammonia after bath, I got this:

Yup – the yarn dyed with the leaves, flowers, and stems turned yellowish and got a little richer in color.

I’m tempted to try this again with fresh, mid-summer dandelions to see if there is any difference in the results.

Lily of the Valley

August 4, 2011 ~ madgeface ~ 3 Comments

The house I grew up in had a big patch of lily of the valley (and lots of other perennials) next to the front door, which we never used. I don’t even remember if there were steps going to that door, though I may be confusing it with my mother’s current front door, which doesn’t have steps. I suppose porch doors that open into the kitchen get used the most in old farmhouses.

Lily of the valley is one of my favorite flowers, as are most of the other flowers that grew around that house. When Mr. Q and I moved into our current house (a bland, pseudo-reproduction in a suburban northern Virginia neighborhood), I set about planting all my childhood favorites. After several failed attempts (I blame the unamended clay topsoil for the failures), I now have two thriving patches of lily of the valley on either side of my doorstep. I like lily of the valley so much that I named one of our dogs (the only one who came to us without a name) Lily.

This time of year, the lily of the valley are in decline. They bloom here in late April, early May. Their leaves start to look a little tattered and worn out by mid-June. See what I mean? They’re the leaves in the foreground; japanese iris is in the background:

Usually, I leave the leaves alone so the plants can collect as much energy as possible and put it into getting larger or making seeds. But this year, I used some in a natural dye experiment.

The sources I’ve read all say that lily of the valley should produce a yellow-green color on wool, which I assume would veer more toward yellow or brown the closer we get to fall. I collected a bucketful of leaves, which turned out to be over a pound. Most of the leaves were still green but a few were brown. I made a dye liquor with them in my trusty enameled lobster pot and kept it just below a simmer until the leaves look wilted/cooked & the green parts looked more yellow/brown. In went my samples, which cooked at roughly the same temp for another hour and then I let them cool overnight. And the next day. And overnight again. These are the colors I got:

I’m trying to do a little better with the pictures; I used “the big camera” for these – the Nikon D90 – instead of my iPhone. And then I made some adjustments in PhotoShop to get closer to the actual color. (No, my monitor isn’t calibrated. No, I don’t know what all the settings are on the camera and yes, in that respect, I might as well be using the iPhone.)

So. I suppose these are a deep yellow – brown, almost beige in the alum- and copper-mordanted samples on the left. The iron-mordanted sample, on the far right, is the most interesting to me because it didn’t come out looking gray. It’s definitely more of a deep khaki color.

Today I revived the indigo vat that I shared with some of my Loudoun Needleworker buddies and am fooling around with it. The next post will probably be about that and my hands smelling like rubber gloves.

Day 6-7 Avocado Dye Experiment

August 1, 2011 ~ madgeface ~ Leave a comment

Well, I couldn’t wait any more. With the butterfly bush dye experiment, I admit I also dyed some samples in the avocado dye baths. See?

Imagine the yarn is layed out in a circle. Starting with the top-most bunch of samples going counter-clockwise, we have:

Pre-mordanted samples – alum, copper, iron

Pit-dyed samples – alum, copper, iron

Peel-dyed samples – alum, copper, iron

I realize now that there’s a better way to display these, but bear with me as I fool around.

I couldn’t wait any more to try dying with the avocado dye liquors. Plus, I needed one of the pots for the butterfly bush experiment. So Saturday, I put both of the avocado liquors into separate containers and then, because I’m not the best estimator or planner, I did some switching around to get all of the peel liquor into the biggest container. And by then – after rinsing and transferring, I just decided to try the liquors.

I cooked the pit dye bath (with sample) for a little over an hour and then let them cool in the pot overnight. I rinsed, dried them, and when I twisted them into skeins, they were dusty/sandy with starch from the pits – ugh. But otherwise, okay. They are, as Mr. Q noted, pretty peachy, except for the iron-mordanted sample, which is a pinkish gray. I wonder if a sample can be mordanted with iron but at a lesser concentration to get a lighter gray? Probably not – it probably doesn’t work that way, right? But maybe. (Anyone with experience/chemistry to back them up, please chime in.)

The peel dye bath is in a large clear plastic container sitting in full-sun on the deck. I put the samples in Saturday afternoon and left them in until this morning. Really, they only had 1 day cooking in the sun. The results are … brown. I’ll check them again in a day or two – it’s been consistently in the 90s with lows in the mid-70s, which should be plenty warm to get some more saturated results. I hope.

In addition to all that activity yesterday, I cook the rest of the butterfly bush blooms in the liquor that I used Saturday for about 2 hrs, let the liquid cool for a few hours, and then strained & decanted it into 2 1-gallon jugs (milk & OJ jugs). The second just is 3/4 filled, so it’s not quite 2 gallons. I meant to cook it down some first, but … eh. Oh well. Hopefully it will keep.

And last, today I trimmed most of my lily of the valleys (convallaria majalis) and started a dye bath with them. They’re supposed to produce something from light green to a gold color, according to Natural Dyes and Home Dying, depending on what time of year the leaves are picked. Of course, this same book talks about using chrome as a mordant (a no-no these days), so we’ll see what color I get. Lily of the Valley leaves (and flowers and berries) are also toxic, so this may be the most dangerous thing I’ve dyed with so far. (Or maybe not; I am being careful & using goggles & gloves when handling the dye liquids.)

Butterfly Bush (Buddleia Davidii) Natural Dye

July 31, 2011 ~ madgeface ~ 2 Comments

I’ve planted lots of butterfly bushes in my yard. By lots I mean more than 10. I started with two – a white one and a purple one – ordered online as bare roots; all the rest are children of those plants. I got them originally because I love lilacs but still don’t have a lilac that’s old enough to flower and because butterfly bushes attract butterflies, hummingbirds, and bees. They flower from July until frost, generally late October/early November here in Northern Virginia, which is far longer than the spring bloom-time for lilacs. The blooms do not smell at all like lilacs, nor are they as powerful smelling as lilac blooms.

I read somewhere (online, probably) that all parts of the plant can be used as a natural dye to produce greens/greenish-blues/teals. I also know that if you dead-head the blooms (trim the spent blooms), a butterfly bush will put more of it’s energy into making even more blooms. Yesterday I dead-headed all but 2 butterfly bushes (the untouched ones are too big for me to get all the spent blooms off of), which when weighed, was 3lbs 6oz of spent blooms with a few leaves, active flowers, and lots of insects.

At 2:30, I put 1lb of the spent blooms in my enamaled lobster pot with enough tap water to cover the plant material. I have an electric buffet stove with 2 burners that I set up on my screened-in porch and started the pot over medium heat. I should have turned the heat up to medium high or high – about 3 hours later, the green parts of the plant material had faded to a mustard yellow, the blooms that were still purple turned kind of a translucent white-gray, and many spiders had escaped the pot aided by a giant chopstick between the pot rim and a potted plant.

I strained most of the plant material from the dye liquor, but didn’t use a strainer fine enough to catch the individual shriveled brown flowers. Into the pot went:

10yd sample skein of pre-mordanted yarn (alum)
10yd sample skein of pre-mordanted yarn (copper)
10yd sample skein of pre-mordanted yarn (iron)
4oz pre-mordanted merino (copper)
48g of the same merino previously mordanted and dyed with mint

An hour & a half later, I turned the heat off and left the fiber in the dye pot overnight. Here are the sample skeins after 30mins:

(small because the focus is off and I’m sparing you some eyestrain)

Rinsed and dried, here are the results:
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I’m surprised that I’ve got what’s essentially a deep yellow with a hint of green in the alum & copper-mordanted fibers (the iron became that deep khaki color). I wonder now if the leaves and stems alone would yield a different color.

It’s all about the visuals …

July 29, 2011 ~ madgeface ~ Leave a comment

First, an update on the avocado dye experiment:

Day 5 after adding water this morning to bring the water level back up over the materials. Mr. Q. called the one on the left a peach color and I reluctantly concede that he’s right. While it’s only day 5 of what I envisioned being a long dye experiment, I’m starting to get impatient, but not enough to dye some of my samples. Maybe tomorrow.

And now for something completely different.

I started a micro blog on tumblr. But do I really need another account? I just started account for Hurl Madgesty (email and on facebook) to keep potty-mouthed derby me separate from potty-mouthed regular me. And how many people do I know that actually use tumblr and would see the stuff that I want to share? And also: I’m thinking about switching to WordPress so that I have more control over the design (which I’m going to start futzing with on blogger first) and so I can respond to comments in-line (if I can do it on blogger, I’ve missed it so far).

Where was I?

Oh, yes – posts on tumblr. Or rather, posts here instead of on tumblr, i.e., I’m going to start posting more often and the posts are going to be smaller and probably pictures or links to pictures or … you know, small stuff. Not epically long cathartic posts (thanks for sticking with me through that), though I’m not promising there won’t be more of those. Are you ready?