The trials of Christmas

I read about freezing flowers, in India Flint's book, Eco Colour, and thought I would give it a go.  That was about 18 months ago.  I have frozen oxalis flowers and camellia petals.  I keep thinking I should re-read what to do with them and actually do it.
I also collected some mulberries a few weeks ago and froze those too.
Now it is the Christmas get-together-and-eat-badly time.  I decided to resurrect a frozen chocolate cheesecake recipe from years ago to take with me to Christmas lunch.  It will definitely contribute to the eat badly theme - cream cheese, chocolate, caster sugar, cream and eggs.
This has involved remembering where all the cooking implements are, how to organise the ingredients and implements properly and then making room in the freezer to get the cheesecake ready - oh no, the freezer is full.
Most of the stuff in the freezer was food but there were also those packets of petals and mulberries.  I desperately needed the room so out came the book to find out what I might try to do with the dyeing plantstuff.
Then down to the glasshouse, where I keep my dyeing supplies, to start using some of the bits that can no longer stay in the freezer.  It wasn't the perfect day for this, the forecast temperature was 39C (102F) and working in the glasshouse wasn't that appealing.  Fortunately it started off cool and has gradually got hotter.  
I took the scarves that I had dyed using mulberries, one that had a blue patch and two that had come out very pale pink.

I just spread the frozen mulberries in the scarves and put them in jars for some cold (not so cold in this weather) dyeing. I added a little bit of alum to the water as I read that it encourages a bluer colour and I thought that might hide the single blue spot on the darker scarf. The water certainly has a more purple colour than the mulberry dyeing I did recently.

I was also told by a woman I met recently, who is a member of the Royal Melbourne Botanic Gardens Plant Craft Cottage Group, that the salty water I soaked the silk in for the mulberry dyeing is not a mordant and that the colour may fade in a couple of years. Hopefully the alum will address this issue.

I feel as if I was just making it up as I went but that is the sort of vibe I get from India's book.  Here's hoping I haven't just wasted all that vegetation and the scarves.

So now they are sitting in their jars and I have to contain my desire to go and see how they are doing.  Maybe I will just forget about them, like I have been doing with the frozen petals. Hopefully I will be able to look at them in the next couple of weeks, not 18 months down the track.

The petals are now in a coolbox with ice packs while I decide what to do with them.  It is too hot, and I am too exhausted from remembering how to cook, to do any more today. Maybe on Boxing Day.

Dyeing with Mulberries part 3

The dyeing continues ...

Of course, I had dye left after my last go and couldn't bear to throw it out, especially as some of the sites say you can continue to use it.  So I have soaked some more fabric in the salt solution and dyed it.   I didn't think there would be enough for the silk I decided to use, so I picked some more berries and boiled them up too.  So now I have two lots of silk soaking.  I noticed that the pot with the used dye is looking a bit lighter than the newer dyebath.  So I will have to wait and see what happens.

used dye being reused

new dye bath

Later ... 24 hours later.

I had left the silk in the two pots and rinsed them out today.  There is a noticeable difference in colour intensity but I like them all.
Not only the used and new dye baths caused different colours but the different types of silk took up the dyes differently.  I had some samples of silks and some offcuts from a wedding dress studio that I had been given, so I do not know what all the different silks were exactly, but they are interesting in their variations.

From the new dyebath, I had twisted some of the pieces of silk to get variation in the dying. 

You can see two scarves of the same fabric beside each other, the new dyebath is at the front, much darker.

The two lots of silk together, quite a bit of variation. The lighter pink on the left is part of the stronger dye bath and is slightly overlapping the same fabric from the lighter dyebath.

Dyeing with Mulberries part 2

Well, I took the fabric out of the dye today - it had been soaking for close to 24 hours.  I rinsed it thoroughly (I still have trouble with the amount of water that this takes, drought hang-over I suppose).  Then I hung it out to dry.
The colour is rather lovely.  A couple of the pieces have blue areas and I'm not sure why.  Perhaps it came from the piece of brick I put in to keep the fabric under the dye.  I have used it previously and it may have had some residue from other dyeing.
I did not move the fabric around in the dyepot as I wanted it to have a little bit of texture.
The different fabrics took up the colour differently but they are all lovely.

Velvet, habutai, crinkle silk and organza.  All silk.

Blue stains on the velvet silk

Blue stains on the habutai silk

Dyeing with mulberries

We have some mulberry trees in our garden because we used to keep silkworms in our classrooms.  The eggs used to hatch before the leaves opened on local mulberry trees (there are a surprising number of them around the streets nearby).  So research was done (by the gardening enthusiast in the family) and it was found that there is a different sort of mulberry tree that has its leaves earlier than the ones we had been using.  Three trees were planted in our yard.
Over the years, we haven't had a great crop of mulberries for humans - the possums and birds and rats have loved them.  Maybe it was the breaking of the drought or maybe the rumour that there is a Powerful Owl in the area and that it has reduced the possum and rat population is true.  Whatever the reason, there is a good crop of berries this year.  We thought about eating them but a) they are not that tasty, b) there are a LOT of them and c) the stems are really hard to get out.  So, as the birds do very colourful dropping on our washing at this season, I thought the berries might be good for dyeing.

Important note:  after picking the mulberries, check the bottoms of your shoes before walking around the house!!

I looked up my Eco Colour by India Flint, various online sites (eg, here and here and here) and have come up with some varied instructions for using berries in dyeing.
Several of my resources mentioned that a good mordant for berry dyeing is half a cup of salt to 8 cups of water.
All the sources say to cut up the fruit, or mash it, and boil it to get a dye bath from plant material (except India Flint, who recommends freezing it. I have put some aside in the freezer, that will have to be a different experiment).  Most say to boil the dye bath for an hour but one said that for red and yellow, you shouldn't do it so long, the heat destroys the colour.
Because I have used various sources, and because most of them say to experiment, I have made up my own way of doing it.  This is partly because I think I didn't read all the sources correctly and so have made some errors.  I get a bit confused when I switch back and forth between 'recipes'.
However ... this is what I have done.
I put 3 cups of berries in 6 cups of water and brought it to the boil for about 5 minutes.  Then I let it sit overnight - one of the links had said that I could get stronger colour if I left the plant material in to soak longer.
The various sources say to soak the fabric in the salty solution but they are not consistent on how long, whether to boil the fabric in it or to put it in the dye solution.  So I have soaked the fabric (did I mention that I am using silk?) in the solution overnight also (only because I had already put it in before I decided to let the dye bath soak overnight). The salt solution and fabric were brought to the boil and let simmer for an hour.  I did this because I thought the heat might help the fabric to absorb the mordant better but I don't want to boil the dye bath any more.  There are various sources that suggest that you can prepare the fabric with the mordant before putting it in the dye bath, so I hope that it will work for a salt mordant.

Now it is sitting in the dye bath and I am waiting 'patiently' to see what will eventuate.