When Meg-the-spinner came to pick up Julia-the-wheel, we had a fascinating conversation about natural dyeing. Meg is one of the old school natural dyers, the kind that makes her own dyes from things hanging around in her environment. I, on the other hand, am one of the “save time, buy prepared extracts” kind of dyers, but I’ve always been curious about the other approach.
Meg was the first person I have encountered to make that old school style sound accessible. Whereas I had heard the process described as acquiring huge quantities of raw dyestuffs and laboriously processing them into dye, Meg described peeling an avocado for dinner, chopping up the peel, tossing it in a jar with some liquid, then waiting a couple of days for dye to develop. Or using the water leftover from steaming beets. Of course, I couldn’t dye a huge quantity of fiber using this method, and some of the dyes might not be extremely lightfast, but for the purpose of experimentation, it is completely doable.
Meg came back the other day bearing gifts. She brought me a jar of in-progress copper blue:
This is just a couple of small pieces of copper pipe marinating in vinegar, and will eventually produce a blue/green dye. I had tried this process before, but apparently the copper pipe I used had anti-tarnish agents added to it, and I was soaking it in ammonia. It didn’t work, and was a bad-smelling, frustrating experience. Meg brought old copper pipe, sans anti-tarnish ingredients, and it is already turning the vinegar a faint bluish shade. I can’t wait to see what this is going to do.
Meg also brought samples of some of the things she has dyed:
Indigo, avocado, and beets (The pale green is from beets! Imagine that!). The fibers are silk, angora, and locks of some sort – possibly mohair?
I’m starting to consider this whole making-your-own-dyestuffs process, and found Felix talking about her own experiments on her blog today.
Perhaps it’s a sign of things to come.
I didn’t know you could make dye from copper. That’s so cool. I’ve only done it with walnuts, and it was laborious but made the most beautiful caramel I’d ever seen.
I’ll bet Meg is a person I met last Tuesday when we went out to Sally Fox’s place with some weaving friends. She said something about dyeing with avocado. Small world.
I can’t wait to see where you go with this.
I absolutely loved learning about that copper/vinegar thing when I went to a natural dyeing workshop and saw a jar with an old copper pipe in it! I had sadly purchased plenty of copper sulphate beforehand, not realising one can make a lovely copper mordant in this far more interesting way.
I can thoroughly recommend developing some habits for natural dyeing. I haven’t tried avocado peels yet but I do periodically decide to save all the onion skins or – like this week, with the walnuts – gather materials which I find lying about and which I know will be good for dyeing.
It’s nice to grow a few things too, if you have a garden. I have madder in its third year which I am wondering about harvesting this weekend, and some weld also, which was easy to grow and which yielded an amazing, almost luminous green colour.
I’ve never dyed something that I couldn’t use with natural dyes; they somehow go with each other in the most amazing way. Good luck with your explorations, I shall look forward to reading about them.
That luminous green is from *beets*? Wow, who knew? I’ve always found natural dyes fascinating, can’t wait to see your experimenting.
I had to look up “mordant” on Wikipedia since I’m fiber-art-ignorant. I was pleased to see that my guess was accurate, but I also saw that Wiki has a note that an expert is needed to complete the article. Paging Ms. Kehew!
Excuse me! I meant: Paging DOCTOR Kehew!