sweetgeorgia

The Golden Fleece

Nothing says “it’s time to finish washing your fleece” like an upcoming fleece sale. That’s right. This Saturday, June 10, there will be a fleece sale in Langley. I was really considering driving down and buying a nice local fleece — maybe something mohair — but then thought, “hey, maybe I should finish using up the Gotland fleece I already have on hand”… so, out come the dyes…

I had just over 1 1/2 pounds left of the fleece, so I washed it, mordanted with alum and dyed it up with Pomegranate and Osage Orange natural dyes. Pomegranate dye is made from rinds of pomegranates and is high in tannin — it is supposed to give a gold/brown/yellow kind of colour. I think it’s better described as “caramel”. The Pomegranate comes as an extract, so all you need to do is add water and go. Here is the dye extract with just a bit of water… it looks just like chocolate ganache… and smells sticky sweet like port and maple syrup…

The Osage Orange, on the other hand, comes as sawdust… It’s cheaper this way. You can buy the liquid extract but Maiwa happened to be sold out when I was there. The Osage dyebath is easy enough to make though — put the sawdust in a pot with enough water to cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Decant and repeat. Since I was waiting for the fleece to finish mordanting, I simmered and decanted the Osage dyebath three times, straining it through an old nylon stocking each time.

Unfortunately, I ran out of alum and so the fleece that was dyed with Pomegranate only had half the amount of alum that it should have. That probably affected the final colour. The Pomegranate dye pot had lots of sticky scum on top, so I was anxious to get the fleece out of the pot and rinse it.

The final colours on this fleece… honey and lemons. That’s what I got. Caramelly honey colour and light lemony yellow.

I’ve separated the darker fleece from the lighter fleece so that when I card and spin the Osage Orange fleece, I’ll get a beautiful, clear lemon yellow yarn and a darker grey/green yellow yarn. The darker yarn will then go into an indigo bath to turn it mossy green. Yeah, sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll do an indigo day and overdye a little of everything I have in the stash — yarn, fibre, wool, silk, whatever.

The colours turned out very much lighter than what I expected, and I have to admit I was a little deflated by that initially — but now when I see that caramel-coloured fleece in the living room light, I love it. It’s subtle and gorgeous — I could dive right in. So this Saturday, instead of buying more fleece, I’ll be playing with this beautiful golden fleece!

Oh, and while I was dyeing on Sunday, Michelle dropped by to show me her first spindle-spun handspun. This is before setting the twist… so wonderful!

And we reviewed my second attempt at getting the right purple on silk…

The Lanaset worked so much better on these skeins of silk. They were immersion dyed in a big pot and the colour is quite even throughout. The skein on the right, the dark eggplant purple, is actually a mix of five different Lanaset dyes to give a colour that is deep but vibrant and glittery.

With a little luck…

Ah, so the plan today is to clear off all the work on my desk so that I can go home and dye all weekend, guilt-free. Wish me luck. The dye plan tomorrow is tons of sock yarn, some new soft and silky kid mohair yarns and some BFL… plus more Gotland.

Here’s the sock yarn I’m working on now… It’s a new base yarn that is 100% superwash merino and comes in 50 g skeins of about 175 yards. So that would be two skeins for a pair of socks. I’m dyeing a few of my original colourways, a few random colourways and a handful of mostly solid colours. With any luck, I’ll be able to post these all in the shop next week (these will be $11 per skein). Again, wish me some of that good ol’ Irish luck.

The Gotland that I’m dyeing tomorrow was mordanted last night in 15% alum at about 175-180F for about an hour (I don’t remember… I was watching The O.C.). I’m letting it sit for a bit (sort of a wool spa) so that the mordant has more time to work. Reasoning? I want to get a good mid-value, vibrant purple using Logwood.

Logwood can be used as wood shavings from the Hematoxylon Campechianum tree, but you have to extract the dye from the wood by soaking the wood chips overnight and boiling (over and over). Alternatively, Maiwa sells an extract that you can use directly in the dye pot. Easy peasy.

On Wednesday, March 1, our spinning/dyeing class at Place des Arts (in Coquitlam, and by the way is taking registrations for spring session now…) mordanted about a pound of wool. My contribution was a big lump of Border Leicester from Willowcrest Farm on Salt Spring Island. I took the mordanted wool home and let it sit, unrinsed in the fridge for a week until the next class. Then on March 8, we dropped the mordanted wool in a pot of Logwood extract. I don’t know if we used too much dye powder or if this was the mordant being super effective, but we got “almost black”.

On Saturday, March 10, for my own blanket project, I took about a pound of raw Gotland and washed and mordanted it quickly. Since I’m too impatient for two-step processes, I basically mordanted first thing in the morning and let it cool 20 minutes before plunging the fleece into a 1% Logwood extract bath. So, there wasn’t too much time for the wool to “cure” before the dyebath. What’s that saying, “good things come to people who wait” or something? Yeah, don’t know that one.

You can see the colour is quite a light lilac/lavender purple colour. Nicely varied through the wool. I quite like it, but take a look at the photo below for comparison…

On the left is the “almost black” purple that I got from the Border Leicester in class (one week curing with mordant, unknown amount of Logwood extract). On the right is the pale lavender purple that I got on the Gotland. Big, huge difference, no? Well, it’s nice to know the wide range of tones you can get from a simple sawdust!

So, tomorrow morning, the next batch of Gotland will go in a dyepot with the leftover Logwood dye bath plus the leftover Cochineal dye bath with an additional 2% Logwood dye powder. I’m aiming to get something quite at bit darker but also slightly shifted off this purple. Even though it’s a natural dye, this purple is so strangely vibrant that it looks synthetic. I think I can understand how purple became the colour of royalty… it seems so foreign and electric.

Happy, lucky Friday!

Adventures with Bugs

Thank you so much for all your lovely comments about the shawl! It is so satisfying to complete something finally! I’m trying to use the momentum from knitting the shawl to finish my handspun Lotus Blossom Shawl…

Sunday’s post with the mystery photo was, yes, cochineal bugs. I took the opportunity while the DH was away in Ottawa to wash some smelly fleece and dye with bugs…

Cochineal is a scale insect that feeds on a kind of cacti in Mexico and South America. The red pigment is from carminic acid which the insect produces to repel its predators. Maiwa sells whole cochineal bugs which need to be ground up before using. At about $9 an ounce, it’s expensive stuff… compared to say, $2 an ounce for madder.

I was gifted a “Magic Bullet” food processor from my father-in-law who bought one and got one free… He seemed less than enthusiastic when I said it would be perfect for grinding up bugs for dyeing. I should learn to keep my thoughts to myself sometimes! But it is fantastic for grinding the bugs to powder in seconds.

Maiwa’s instructions recommend 4 to 8% WOF (per weight of fibre) of cochineal. Since it’s so expensive, I opted to go with 4% — so about 17.5 g for the pound or so of Gotland I was dyeing. Oh, here’s the raw Gotland fleece:

I basically weighed a big chunk of raw fleece, washed it with Dawn and let it dry so that I could weigh it again afterwards and figure out what I would be left with*. In this case, I lost about 20% of weight after washing the fleece — that’s all dirt and grease! I was left with just over a pound of fleece that went into this dyepot. It was mordanted with both alum and cream of tartar because I wanted a real fuschia red/pink colour. Without the cream of tartar, I think the dye ends up a warmer red.

The powdered cochineal was boiled up with a touch of vinegar and some water for about 15 minutes and decanted. I repeated this two more times, so there were in total three decantings of the cochineal. I saved the powder that was left in the pot for a future dye session (maybe mixing it with logwood or lac?). The decanted dye solution was returned to the pot and I added the mordanted fleece:

The fleece dyed slightly unevenly with the tips, of course, being a lot darker than the rest. Since I know the yield (80% of raw fleece) for this fleece, I’m not planning on washing and drying anymore of it. I’ll wash it, mordant it right away and then drop it in the dye pot. The extra drying and wetting times just increases the handling of the fleece and increases the chance that it will felt or get all messed up.

Even with just 4% dye, the dye pot wasn’t even close to exhausting, so in mild panic, I dropped in some other skeins of yarn in an attempt to exhaust the pot. There was a handful of silk noil, some corriedale wool roving and two skeins of stuff I had handpainted…

None of this extra yarn or fibre was mordanted, but still took on a lot of colour. The lime green portions of the skein turned into a really interesting green-gold colour — not really something you could easily mix from synthetic dye powders… it just seems like a whole other layer of colour. Very very interesting.

I’m using this skein as warp in my next weaving project. And even after adding these extra fibres to the pot, the pot still didn’t exhaust. So not wanting to be wasteful, I kept the rest of the stock for next time!

* My bad: Yesterday I termed this “degreased wool per raw wool” as “shrinkage” — but shrinkage is loss of yardage. If anybody knows the proper term for this (yield?), let me know please!

Trying to grow

In addition to the tiny list of knitting/spinning resolutions for 2006, I have other resolutions too. One big one being “try not to kill anymore plants”.

We’ve lived at our little house for 4 1/2 years now and over these past few years, my attempts at gardening have yielded:

• sad death of two tomato plants (problem was me watering overhead)
• vicious murder, by me, of one giant mint plant (problem was me planting it in the ground alongside other things)
• stunted growth of many, many basil plants (problem was me planting it next to the mint)
• annual death of little tiny thyme plants resulting in having to purchase fresh thyme at the store (problem was me forgetting to water)
• monthly, expensive replacement of all the plants in a little container by the front door (problem is we don’t come in the front door so I don’t know when the plants need to be watered, and … I forget to water)
• three sad and scraggly looking roses in the front yard (again, me watering overhead — these roses were nice when I bought them).
• an almost completely moss-covered lawn — there are a few token blades of real grass (this is not me, I tried planting grass seeds but I think they got eaten)
• one, and only one, chili which I harvested and left on the kitchen counter until it dried up and had to be tossed (me, I forgot to use it)

I believe that I have the ultimate black thumb. Even the Chinese Fortune Teller told me that I should avoid agricultural enterprises at all costs (well, really, he told me not to marry a farmer). But part of me, maybe the vain part, wants my yard to not give the impression that we live in a crackhouse. Funny, that.

A couple months ago, I lamented to Liz at Pocket Farm that the only things that manage to grow in my garden are mint and sage. She told me it was likely because my soil needed some fortification since herbs are kind of weed-like and thrive in crappy soil. So first things first, I need to feed the garden.

Then, I want to plant a tiny dye garden. Some of these dye plants are reportedly also a little weed-like anyway so it sounds right up my alley! The space I have is currently about 2′ x 6′ (tiny, I know) and is a raised bed. It’s pretty much partial shade. This part of Vancouver is zone 7.

Any hints, tips, suggestions? Anybody have a dyers garden already? I’m thinking Indigo, Madder, Coreopsis, Dyer’s Chamomile, Lady’s Mantle among others. Of course they won’t all fit in that little 2×6 plot, but I may be convinced to remove our so-called lawn.

And finally, in the “always the last to know” category — Carin and stylish Jen let me know that I was nominated for the Best of the Blogs in the Knitting/Craft category. Whoa! How very flattering and exciting to be considered amongst some of my favourite bloggers like Jody at Savannachik, Eunny and Grumperina! If you haven’t already, you can go here http://www.thebestofblogs.com/vote-here/ to vote!