There are some nice pictures in this post if you can just make it through a bit of text...
I derive an immense amount of pleasure from working with natural dyes. Generally speaking, natural dyes are made from... natural substances, whether that be vegetable, animal, or mineral. For example, onion skins, dried cochineal insects, and rust are all natural dyes. Not all natural materials produce colour, not all colour is light fast. The colour obtained from a plant might (and usually doesn't) match the original colour of the plant itself. Some dyes require a mordant to fix the colour to the fibre, some dyes work better on some fibres than others, the pH of the water and trace chemicals/minerals can affect the colour, temperature and concentration and duration of the dyebath all affect colour as well. Then there's post processing, using nearly-exhausted baths, and other weird ways of getting colour to stick to the fibres... Ah! Wonderful, wonderful stuff.
I wanted to see what happens when one adds the dyestuff to a jar full of water and fibre and lets it sit. I put a few chips and some cheesecloth in a little jar of water and let it sit for a week. The resulting colour was a lovely earthy red-brown. There's a ton of colour in those little chips, so I saved them and topped up the jar with more cheesecloth and a few silk hankies. It sat in the jar for two and a half weeks (I kind of forgot about it).
The cheesecloth was this lovely orange brown, but the second I started to rinse it, it turned fuchsia before settling to a soft blue-grey. C'est d'la magie!
The silk hankies in the foreground with some of the logwood chips stuck in them, and the cheesecloth behind it.
So that was neat. I've been pretty bad with measuring out specific weights of dyestuff. I'm usually meticulous in my record keeping, but lately I've just been throwing stuff in a pot. Using all of it, but being far less careful with quantities. Makes pricing dyed items difficult, but I've got a breakdown of the labour involved and an average of the cost-per-gram of all of my dyestuffs.
Anyway, I've been in production mode in preparation for the upcoming opening of the Barracks shop. I prefer making one of a kind things, and for ages I was vehemently against duplicating my products. I still won't duplicate things, but I've realized that making a bunch of stuff at the same time is efficient and kind of fun to orchestrate. For example, yesterday I cut down two big sheets of watercolour paper, prepped my printing station, and printed 12 copies of my "fancy man". It took a while, and I had a 50% loss rate (a combination of going too quickly, using a bad squeegee, and being very hungry), but the prints that did turn out are spectacular! They'll be for sale (12$ a piece?) at this bitchin' party on Friday.
When I got home after that printing extravaganza, I picked up the nice fat parcel Dharma sent me. Silk scarves and hankies in abundance were what I ordered, and man, am I excited to make them beautiful! Not that there's something displeasing about a pristine white scarf, but the transformation of the object with scouring, dyeing, and printing is a real treat.
Ah, Dharma! My order was here within a week, and everything is of such good quality. I have so much scouring ahead of me...
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