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Sunday 16 September 2012

Another Day Another Dye

Sunday - day off in France.  A time to do whatever we want to do . . . except work!

First of all, the final photos of my woad dyeing session the other day :-


I'd put some merino fleece and a skein of wool/silk in the dyepot overnight, and they came out as deep a blue as the previous two skeins.  I'm pretty sure I could have dyed more with this dyepot, but I didn't have any more yarn to put in there.  I'll try and be more organised with the next lot.

In the meantime, I decided to harvest my madder bed.  I recently dug up some roots for replanting, and then let the rest of the bed dry out, so this morning I dug the remaining roots.  These have to be washed quite well because any soil left on there can make the dye brown.



The red colour is quite visible on this photo.  There were some quite thick roots in there, but lots of thin ones as well, so I chopped the whole lot and put them to soak in cold water.  I reckoned the thin ones probably contained some colour, however little, which would add to the overall dye.  The roots started seeping colour almost as soon as I put them in the water.


This will sit overnight and I'll dye with it tomorrow.

I also harvested all the dried out plant tops to use as a separate dye.  I broke these up into pieces and heated them in water for about an hour.  The colour at that point was quite deep, so I dunked my two skeins from Thursday in there and got quite a pale dirty pinkish colour.


The skeins are still wet in this photo, so I think it'll probably be even paler when it's dry.  I might just re-dip this briefly in the madder root dye tomorrow to make it a better pink. Then the plan is to dye the remaining white stripes in the main madder dyebath.  I'll let you know how it turns out tomorrow.


This is the latest cotton boll which is just starting to open.  The centre has turned brown and is drying out and just beginning to split.  The white cotton should be visible tomorrow I think.  This is one of the bigger bolls, so it'll be interesting to see how it develops.

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