Colour Palette of the Month - February!

In November I was in Liverpool for a birthday treat.  Obviously a trip to the docks is a must and while there I took this photograph.

Initially it was the shapes that attracted me, but once uploaded to Photoshop the colours caught my eye and following my interest in urban colour I decided to use it for my February colour palette.

How would I recreate the colours in natural dye extracts?

From Left to Right:
Several dips of indigo; a pale yellow, maybe oak gall or 2% kamala with a couple of dips indigo; oak gall or 2% kamala with one light dip of indigo; a very light dip in indigo; two or three dip in indigo; one short dip in indigo and finally a 2% red lac or a mix of red lac and lodhra bark.

How would you recreate the colours?

I hope you enjoy it.

Printing with Natural Dyes

I want to bring you a post from an interesting textile blog I found.  It's aimed at textile students throughout the world and there is a lot of industry information on it, but came across an interesting post about printing with natural dyes.  It's not very detailed, but it will give you enough information for you to work out how to do it!  My Textile Notes is the name of the blog and has lots of interesting information.

Any of the Pure Tinctoria natural mordants are full of tannins, oak gall (on the left) and cutch are the usual ones to use and myrobalan for the mordant printing are all available on the Pure Tinctoria website.

Thickeners such as Agar Agar and Gum Tragacanth are natural and easily obtained on the high street.

Let use know if you have had a go at natural printing or if you are planning to!  We'd love to see your results.

Colour Palette of the Month - January!

This beautiful bouquet was given to me last year by a friend I'd helped through a difficult period in her life.  I found it so inspiring that I used it for January's colour palette.

Good greens are difficult to obtain in natural dyeing, but I think the left one of the two greens, here, would be produced by using dhak and indigo and the second one might be obtained by modifying with iron water.  The yellow is certainly like dhak and the centre cream colour might be the natural fleece colour or oak gall.

What do you think?

Colour Palette of the Month - December!

I love colour and find it really hard to work with neutrals and monochromatic palettes.  It's strange then, that in this monochromatic snowy and frosty landscape I'm beginning to adjust!

Monday morning, this week, was really frosty in the Trent Valley and I couldn't help but take this photograph at 8.30 while out for our morning walk.

When I downloaded the image from my Blackberry I was really taken with the lovely rich browns, creams and apricots,  moving me to use it as my palette for December and as my Seasonal Greetings card.  It puts a new twist on winter colours!  It's certainly not winter white, is it?


Dyeing the lovely rich colours would be a challenge and I think I'd use cutch (Thar) or sappenwood (Garden) with iron water for the browns and cutch for the apricot shade, with oak gall for the cream.  What would you use?

Colour Palette of the Month - November!

Colour Inspirations from Urban Landscapes
At the beginning of October I had a lovely week-end in London.  On the Saturday I wanted to go to the Tate Modern to see the Gaugan Exhibition and decided to walk along part of the Embankment to the Millenium Bridge.
Along the way I came across quite a few juxtapositions of old buildings and new buildings as you can see on the right.  This particular one really caught my eye with the "all glass" building that takes on an indigo colour in the background and the beautiful old building, with it's sand coloured brick and detailing stone work.
How lovely this colour palette would be in natural dyes and weave!  From the top I'd use indigo with an iron modification; indigo on it's own, but dipped several times to build up the deep blue; a very light, quick dip in indigo with a very quick and light modification with iron to get the blue grey; Oak Gall modified with citric acid; cutch.
Mm..... This has really got me thinking!  What about you, what would you use?

Colour Inspirations from Landscapes

A two day break in Anglesey has given me three beautiful colour palettes, one very fresh, one very warm and one a combination of warm and cool.

The first was inspired by the heathland above South Stacks Lighthouse on Holy Island. These fresh colours reflect the low growing heather and gorse.

The yellow could be dyed by using dhak or Himalayan rhubarb root.  The greens could be obtained by over dyeing the same colours with indigo and the pinks could be dyed by a weak solution of red lac and oak gall.

The next palette shows the fabulous earthy colours found on Parys Mountain, near Amlwch, on the north side of the island.

The rich, warm colours lend themselves to natural dyes beautifully.  Oak gall, golden dock, and a weak solution of purple lac lightly over dyed with indigo and oak gall also lightly over dyed with indigo would all be worth trying to obtain the colours.

Finally, these blues and soft beiges were inspired by the beach at Aberffraw on the south of Anglesey.  The blues can be found in indigo and the sand colours could be found in oak gall or sanderswood natural dye extracts.

Lodhra Bark/Oak Gall

Despite stringent controls I've found that I've been sent oak gall instead of lodhra bark by the manufacturer. This mistake will have occured because they insist that I use Trade Names rather than the plant name!

If you've found that your lodhra bark gives a pale cream colour instead of the lovely orange, please let me know and I'll replace it free of charge and post free.

If you're not sure which is which a rather crude description of lodhra bark is that the extract looks like brown sweepings from the floor while oak gall looks like a yellow brown powder.

I'm so sorry this has happened and will ensure that it doesn't happen again.

Best wishes

Alison

Mordanting Cellulose Fibres

I was reading Deb Bamfords blog, A History of Colour, today and her post was about mordanting cellulose fibres. This prompted me write about some mordanting I did earlier this year with my friend Lorraine.

Those of you who visit Pure Tinctoria at Woolfest and Wonderwool Wales will know Lorraine as my very able helper. I wanted to reward Lorraine for all the help she gives me at these events and won't take a penny in recompense. Knowing she likes makeing quilts, last year I gave her a dyeing kit and cotton fabric for her birthday, and we got together to do the mordanting.

Now, I'm a passionate advocate for wool, British in particular, so I had to get out all my books to check how to do the mordanting properly! I knew I could do it in a one stage process, using aluminium acetate, but Lorraine wanted to do it "traditionally" with the everything in her "kit". So we opted to follow the alum, tannin, alum process. The tannin component was Amber-M (Oak Gall).

I was really impressed with the fabulous colours we got. They are so rich.

This image is of the colours before Lorraine pressed the fabric, but even then they are really beautiful. From Left to Right they are:
Ganges (Dhak), Amazon (Annatto), Rhine-M (Red Lac) and Rhine-S (Purple Lac).

Gift Idea No. 9!

This is a really simple idea, following on from the last post.

For spinners who've never tried natural dye extracts (or even dyeing!), why not buy them one of the substantive dyes that contain tannin. These are Amber-M (Oak Gall), Kango (Myrobalan), Pacific (Pomegranate) and Thar (Cutch). One 25g packet of any one of these dyes will dye 500g of fibres and shouldn't need any other mordant, such as alum and cream of tartar and so can be done in one step:

• Weight your fibres in their dry state
• Wet them out (if using tops curl them into a bundle and secure end round the bundle then immerse in warm water with a squirt of washing liquid
• Weigh up to 5g of dye extract for each 100g of wool yarn.
• Dissolve the dye in a small amount of water, heating if necessary to aid the dissolving or add a "grain" of washing soda.
• Top up the water so that it will be sufficient to cover your yarn when it's in the pot.
• Add your wetted out yarn to the pot.
• Slowly bring to a simmer over about 45 minutes.
• Simmer for 45 minutes.
• Cool in the pot then rinse thoroughly.

For as little as £1.30 for the dye and your fibrey friends own fibre what more could they want!