I Just Couldn't Resist!

It was too much for me, all those lovely hollyhock flowers fallen on the ground. I just had to pick them up.

I also had to clear out the freezer so I can make the Geraldine Dillon frozen chocolate cheesecake - I only make it once a year and the time is upon us. Christmas lunch, on a hot day, purportedly.

So out came the frozen hollyhocks which have been there for who knows how long.

I had obviously been thinking about this for a few days because I had some silk soaking in alum, since Saturday. I began to think that it probably isn't good for the silk to be soaking for days in a mordant, so I had to get to today and do something with it all.

Then I dissolved some alum in a pot of water. As usual, I didn't have any great plan or any good, scientific method. I just looked through old posts and tried to remember what I did last year.

I found an interesting site on natural dyeing.

I came across a recipe for using hollyhock flowers in cooking too. Apparently, it is related to the hibiscus, which can be substituted in the recipe. So I suppose hibiscus might dye fabric also. But our flowers are pink and not as dark as the hollyhocks, so I might leave that experimentation till much later.

So now I have two jars with various silk fabrics. They are doing the cold water, slow dyeing thing (but in the hothouse in summer and some days are forecast to be hot soon, so not that cold). One jar has frozen hollyhock flowers and the other has ones I picked up off the ground today. As it rained yesterday, the colour may not be as good as it would have been if I had done it yesterday, but yesterday was too hot to do much.

The frozen flowers are in the right-hand jar. I think the colour is more intense, it certainly came out more quickly. I will have to wait a few days to see if the dried flowers develop more intensity. 

Then I decided to make a dye bath. I dissolved some alum in the water, heated it up and then put in the rest of the frozen flowers. The colour comes out immediately, it is wonderful to see.

I put the fabric in after the flowers had been simmering for about 40 minutes - I remember reading that reds and yellows don't do so well if you heat them for too long.

After draining out the flowers, I put in some untreated silk and let it simmer for about another half hour. It is currently cooling down. I will leave it overnight and rinse it out tomorrow.

Once again, I have no ideas for using the silk pieces. None of them is very large, it will have to be some sort of collage or patchwork.

But I just couldn't let the flowers go to waste! Once again, I have only used the flowers that have dried up and fallen off the plant.

Looking on the bright side.

Summer is arriving with a blast.  It is going to be hot all week.  I have been celebrating the cool summer so far but now it appears to be gone, gone, gone.
Anyway, I was walking home from the shops when I found a smallish branch fallen off a eucalyptus tree.  I have been trying to get some natural dyeing to be green - in a not very methodical or persistent way.
Aha, I thought, green leaves that haven't been ripped untimely from the tree - by me anyway.  I think I have read somewhere in my meanderings around the web that you can get green dye from green eucalyptus leaves.
Waste not, want not.  I lugged the branch home and braved the glasshouse - it was HOT in there.  But waste not, want not, this hot weather should be good for something.
I now have some silk fabric soaking in glass jars, using all that lovely hot sunshine.

I strongly suspect that nothing much is going to happen, especially for bottom picture, it looks  a lot like clear water to me.

I also put some silk in a jar that has some dye bath I got when we decided to throw out the dandelions, after my disappointing result recently.  The gardener in the family boils them up to kill the seeds and then puts them in the compost.  Why waste all that energy, I thought?  I'll put all the flower heads in and boil them up, see what I get.
What I got was a brownish yellow.  But I decided not to throw it out yet, it might be useful.  I think it is much stronger than my previous sample because I jammed the flowers in, didn't think about just using some to see how it goes, so I can have some left if it goes well.
Then the solar dyeing frenzy came over me - as much frenzy as I can raise on such a hot day. So now there is some silk in that dye too, cooking in the glasshouse.

The hollyhocks are throwing their flowers down in the heat and the heat is desiccating them rather quickly, so I am thinking of trying some solar dyeing using the dried flowers - once I recover from being out there in the middle of the day. I have plenty of days to think about it, it doesn't have to happen today.  The heat will be here for a while now, I think. But, on the bright side, it is inspiring me to play with some more dyeing.
Wonder what I will ever do with all these bits of silk, so many of them brown.

Christmas inertia

I am trying to overcome the inertia that you get once Christmas is over.  Boxing Day was ok, I had a few things to do - and avoided all shopping centres.
But I had put today aside to finally do something with the frozen flowers.

So far I have soaked some silk in alum solution. I did that a couple of days ago and today I actually got some flowers out of the freezer and soaked them in lukewarm water, as recommended by India Flint.
I am using two books: Eco-Colour by India Flint and Colours from Nature by Jenny Dean.
India recommends putting the frozen flowers in a bag that can be squeezed to get the colour out, so I have used cotton gauze.  It usually takes some of the colour and I have kept those bits for machine embroideries. This time, though, the gauze has not been soaked in alum and neither have the flowers. So I used the water I had soaked the silk in, in case there is any alum left in it.

The hollyhocks have given some purple colour, almost immediately. I diligently squeezed the mass of flowers, they end up feeling really squishy and slightly disgusting. The colour was very pale, so I am leaving the fabric in with the frozen flowers and hoping that more colour will leach out. I will leave it for a few days.
I tried this previously and the plant matter started to rot and gave me some stains, so I will have to keep an eye on it, not leave it as long as I did previously. But I have also thought that it might not rot if it is under the liquid, so I have weighed it all down with a jar.  Here's hoping.
The gardener in the family has been doing daily harvesting of dandelion flowers for me. I read that you can use them for dyeing - and it stops them from seeding and causing more plants to grow in our garden, where we don't really want them.

I had initially thought that I might get yellow dye but when I read the book last night, it was under the Green section.  And when I looked at the frozen pile I realised that it is predominantly green.

So far it is looking a very murky brown-green-yellow colour, and rather pale.  I may have to overdye that fabric.  At least the alum is supposed to be ok environmentally and I can put the plant matter in the compost heap.

Christmas Eve

The weather was perfect today - not hot, not cold, not windy, not anything negative. I was finally inspired to go out to our new glasshouse and dig out some of the dyeing equipment. I soaked some of my silk in an alum solution.  It has boiled for an hour and is being left for a time. As it is Christmas day tomorrow, I may not get around to doing the dyeing part, I will see. The recommendation is to leave it overnight, at least. Last year I inadvertently left some of the fabric for over a week but later found out that that is a recommended practice. I don't think I will last that long this year though.
The hollyhocks are in wonderful bloom. I have been keeping some out of the freezer, letting them get all dry and crumbly. I hope they work as well as last year.
Then I decided to take some more pictures of the flowers, trying some of the settings on my camera. It takes quite good images on the automatic setting but I decided to play around with the settings today, to see if I can remember how to do certain things, and to see if I could get some special effects. Some of the photos turned out ok.

Playing around with the settings, not that successfully.

After dinner we decided that we should take the dog out - it had got too hot for her in the afternoon and we had been busy in the morning. Off we went to Yarra Bend Park. We didn't get there till almost 9.00 and the sun was about to set.
Lo and behold (very appropriate for Christmas) a huge stream of fruit bats/flying foxes were just leaving to go foraging in the night. There were thousands of them!!
I took some more photos. It was quite dark by then and I couldn't see the camera that well, so the playing around with settings wasn't fully successful. But it was a wonderful sight and a lovely night for a walk.

Oxalis

Someone commented to our gardener family member  that the yellow flowers in our garden were looking lovely. They are - they are also a weed! And they spread out more and more each year.

Oxalis growing along the Eastern Freeway

I have dyed fabric with the flowers and can feel the urge coming over me to help with the eradication of the plant by cutting off the flowers and not allowing pollination but I have discovered that it spreads by bulbs, not seeds. So that won't be useful. So much for that urge.

I got good results last time by using frozen flowers. My family is not keen for me to do that again as I still have a biggish bag of hollyhock flowers in the freezer - and we don't have a big one. However, it is flowering season and I need to get them while they are around.  Maybe I should bite the bullet and just use them fresh. Get myself organised and use the frozen hollyhocks and the fresh oxalis.
Our glasshouse is being repaired, so I will have to find a new place to work for the time being. But if I leave it long enough, the glasshouse will be all beautiful and inviting and I might even feel enthusiastic about the dyeing.
We had to remove the hollyhock that was STILL FLOWERING last week, ready for the builders to trample all over the garden bed. Would you believe that it had buds?!

We went walking at Yarra Bend recently and saw a pink flower that looked a lot like oxalis, and had similarly shaped leaves, only flower and leaves were much bigger.
The picture was taken with my phone and I have great difficulty focussing it, apologies.

Then I noticed a slightly pinkish-white flower in our garden. It looks like oxalis too, only not yellow. That one has been got rid of, I can't imagine getting a good dye from such a pale flower.

Simple Onion Skin Dyeing

Today's date is 1/3/13, I just have to do a post.
So ...
In a recent post, I mentioned using onion skins to dye my silk scarf.  Then I realised that I hadn't posted about it, so here it is.
It was very easy actually.  I used India Flint's Eco Colour again (getting value for having bought the book!).
I laid out the scarf, folded it in half lengthways, and the put pieces of onion skin, laid out artistically of course, along the scarf.  Then I sprayed it with vinegar, rolled it up and put it in a ziplock bag.  I left it out in the glasshouse (during the December summer weather) for 10 days.  I rinsed it a couple of times, with a small amount of vinegar in the final rinse.

I had used a small amount of red onion and red onion skin and that showed up too.

Natural dyeing with hollyhocks that were not frozen

As I was getting ready to do more dyeing using the frozen flowers, I accidentally crumbled some of the dried flower that I had just picked up from the ground onto one of my pieces of silk.  The silk was damp as it had been soaking in an alum solution and the colour just rushed out from the crumbled bits. It was amazing to see.
Of course I couldn't resist that - I had to see if it would stay in the fabric.  So I laid out some of the silk and crumbled the dried flowers and some of the fresh petals that had fallen off (I'm still not picking them off the plant, there is no need, there are so many flowers) along the length of the silk and rolled it up.

Then I got all confused, as I have already said (I'm blaming the hot weather), and put the fabric in a jar with the leftover alum solution.  I think I had intended to just let it lie and dry out in a plastic bag, as I did with onion skins and vinegar recently.

However, I didn't.  So it has been in the jar, in the glasshouse, for three days.  The water changed colour over that time, giving me hope that something good would be happening.

Today I took it out and rinsed it.  I was very excited to see the different colours.  The dried petals have given quite a darker colour and there are parts that have taken on the redder fresh petals.  The dye has stayed, not much came out in the rinse at all.

I was interested to see that some of the petals had become quite transparent, the colour had leached out.

I did this at the same time as the frozen flowers that went mouldy. There was no mould with this lot, perhaps because it was in an airtight jar or perhaps it had something to do with the alum solution. I am not a scientist so don't know. I am just happy that there was no staining that I didn't want!

Just in time!

I decided that I should rinse out my silk today, the lot that is soaking with the fresh and the frozen hollyhock flowers.  I was just in time!!  The hollyhock petals that were in the bag, sitting on top of the folded silk pieces, were starting to go mouldy. There was also a little bit of mould floating around on top of the water. The colour of the muslin had changed too, it was blueish (where it wasn't mouldy brown).

You can see a picture of it before the mould set in here.

This is the lot that I had put into fresh water.  I had left the hollyhocks in the bag and let the whole lot soak for three days.  It was in the glasshouse, in days that are consistently in the high 20 and low 30 degrees (C).

I was quite surprised to see the different patterns on the silk, from the folding.  I had really expected that the dye would have soaked through in three days, especially with the chiffon.  I had only folded them and placed the frozen petal bag on top, so no clamping, etc. The mould doesn't seem to have stained the fabric either - as I said, Just In Time!
Not that much dye rinsed out, which was pleasing in these days of very little rain.

You can just see the hollyhock, still valiantly flowering,  in the background.

The silk is all out on the line drying at the moment.  That should take about 10 minutes.

Well the 10 minutes are up and I have brought them inside.
Here they are without the sun shining on them, the satin tends to be hard to photograph.

The front piece was a small piece of pongee that did get some mould on it.  It takes the colour up more strongly.

The front and back of the satin, the colour looks stronger on the back.

There may have been a little staining from the mould, it is hard to tell and, obviously, doesn't detract from the patterns.

Dyeing with gumnuts

Waste not, want not .... maybe that means don't throw anything out!
Quite a few months ago, I noticed that a tree in our street had had a branch broken off - probably by vandals but maybe not as it was hanging over the footpath and the only branch broken off was the one that was in the way.  This particular tree has spectacular red gum blossoms, I'm not sure what variety of eucalypt it is but it is gorgeous. It might be Eucalyptus Ficifolia.

It also has large clumps of big gumnuts after the flowers die away and there were heaps (literally) of them on the nature strip.  They were there for days and eventually I couldn't resist them.  I took our green recycling bin down and cleaned up most of the mess but kept a bucketful of the gumnuts, just to see if I could ever do anything with them.

There they were, looking at me while I was playing around with the mulberry dyeing.  As I had been researching the mulberry dyeing, I had noticed that someone had said that you have to soak nut casings before you used them so I thought I would see if that worked in this case too.
I left them soaking for a couple of days before boiling them up.  I put a silk scarf in there to see if it would take up any dye.  Not much happened so I turned it off after a couple of hours of boiling - the silk was a dirty white colour.

Being ever hopeful, I decided to leave the silk in the pot and see what would happen.  It is spring here and the sun is shining frequently.  My dye setup is in our glasshouse, so it would stay warm during the days (and not that cold during the nights).  After another day, I noticed that the water was a bit darker.  Not being totally a patient person, I took the scarf out and rinsed it.  It is a pale brown colour, quite pretty really.   Eucalyptus being a substantive dye, I have used no mordant.

I have left the gumnuts to soak some more and will see what sort of dyebath I get.  Then I will try some more silk pieces and see what eventuates.

As with the mulberry dyeing, I am not sure why I am dyeing this fabric, I have no particular project in mind and hence am only dyeing scraps, not specific types or sizes of silk.  But it is all interesting and satisfying.

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.

Back to Dyeing

In pursuit of a design, I have used some of my old naturally dyed silk to play around with some machine embroidery.  I only had relatively small pieces left but that was fine for the design I have been working on in the last few days.

However, I decided that I might want some larger pieces and, as I had some undyed silk that I bought about a year ago, and some pieces I got on the remnant table at an expensive silk shop recently, I decided to do some natural dyeing.
I had also picked up some bark while walking at Yarra Bend recently, so the dyeing has been in the back of my mind for a while, obviously. I don't know what the trees were that I got the bark from, they had thick, stringy bark that looked like it would give good colour.

This weekend I decided to do something about it - finally.  I found some old bark that I must have collected about a year ago, lemon scented eucalyptus. I wasn't sure if having had it lie around for so long would be good or bad - I'm still not sure as it worked well but, who knows, it may have worked better if I had used it closer to the time I collected it.  Or, it may have worked well as it has been dry all that time and perhaps it was getting more intense.

Using very old lemon scented bark.  

I then used the bark that I collected recently, not knowing if the rain we have been having much more consistently this year would affect it, make it less strong.  That worked well too.  So I am a happy little vegemite at present.

As you can see, one of the fabrics was obviously not 100% silk, the weft stayed white.

It is amazing how different sorts of silk fabric take the colour up, some were very dark while others were more muted.

Being a not very precise dyer, I just put the bark in some water, boiled it up with the silk in it and let it simmer for an hour or so.  Then I let it all cool down overnight and washed the silk out in the morning.

There was quite a lot of good looking dye bath left.  I couldn't just throw it out, so in went some more silk, some mordant and I heated it up for another hour.  There is still more dye bath left, lots more dyeing to do soon.

The recent bark dye with ferrous sulphate added.

All of these were from the recent bark, some with mordant, some with none.

This one had copper sulphate added.

To top it all off, I still had a piece of tissue silk not used and some leftover dyebath with the ferrous sulphate, so I did a cold soak for an hour.  

Now all I have to do is come up with a design that will use a lot of these fabrics, otherwise I have been having a very expensive play for no good reason.

Natural dyeing with olives

We have an olive tree but don't usually harvest the olives.  This year my sister has been collecting the olives that have survived the birds (the Indian minahs seem to love them) and has been salting them.  She collected some that fell on our drive to use as compost.  But we seem to be in a very good area for olive trees to grow, so she decided to boil them to they stop them propagating.
I had the brainwave of seeing if I could do some natural dyeing with them while they boiled.

I looked on the internet and couldn't find any information - maybe I'm just not a good researcher.

I tried what I had done previously with the eucalyptus bark, just plonk some fabric in and see what happens. Very scientific.

I put in a small bit of polyester which I did not expect to dye.  I also put in a small piece of habutai silk and some silk velvet (that I was not sure was 100% silk but knew that some of it is silk).  I let them boil in with the olives for about an hour.  Then I let them cool down in the water overnight.

After about 24 hours - I was busy doing other things - I drained the olives out, collected the dye bath in case I can do something else with it, and rinsed out the fabric.

As I suspected, the polyester did not colour very much at all, it is now a pinkish white.

The two pictures are with flash and without flash, showing the different intensities of the colours on different fabrics.

The silk took the colour quite well and the velvet has two different colours, so part is silk and the other part may be viscose.  Strangely enough, there is a slight greenish tint to the nap of the velvet - olive green perhaps?

I have washed them with detergent and they seem to have retained the colour.  I am not sure if it will be colourfast though.  I will have to do more research.
I am hoping to use the dyebath and see if using mordants will make much difference.
Ahh, holidays, time to play.

India Flint dyeing video

One of the ladies in the Aus/NZ art quilt group posted a link to a very interesting India Flint short video.

I have also found a 5 day retreat she is doing later in the year at Crockett Cottage Studio in Mansfield, Victoria.
When we studied dyeing last year in my course, I read India Flint's book and found some very interesting ideas in it. I had fun dyeing and could be doing some now, while the bark is falling off the trees. But it is hot and my setup is in the glasshouse, so that's not an enticing option at the moment.

More natural dyeing with eucalyptus bark

I have done some more experimenting with the bark of the lemon scented eucalpytus that grows next door. This time I broke the bark into small pieces and soaked them for 24 hours.

I brought it to the boil and simmered it for an hour. When I drained the liquid out I had quite a dark dye bath.

Because I was using some small pieces of wool, I allowed it to cool before putting in the wetted wool and silk. Then I brought it back to the boil and simmered it for 30 minutes. As eucalyptus is a substantive dye, I did not put in any mordant in the first experiment.


Here are some pictures of the silk sliver and the wool batting, usually used for quilting. The colour was not strong but was pretty.