Finally - Success with Purple Cabbage!

After several attempts on different yarns: cotton, wool, silk, soy, mohair, I managed to successfully dye yarn with Purple Cabbage.

It doesn't sound remarkable except that the Purple Cabbage gives great colours in the pot and then they wash out (cotton) or fade out quickly in light (silk) or hang around for a while (wool) then fade to greige or take only the slightest tint (mohair).

Then there is soy yarn. For some reason Soy loves to be dyed. I am yet to understand why but it is so easy to dye its amazing.

Unfortunately I had only about 20 grams of soy yarn left, so I needed more for a proper test. After months of searching, I found a 70% wool 30% soy yarn. I decided to give it a go hoping the percentage of soy was enough. And yes, it was.

Furthermore the soy enjoyed all the things the wool didn't like such as changing the acidity of the dye bath to make different colours.

So happily I have blue, purple and pink from one dye bath just by adding different things to alter the acidity. I added soda ash to make blue, nothing to make purple (clearly my tapwater is fairly neutral) and a little vinegar to make pink.

The darkest shades were the first dye batch (24 hours) then the paler shades were the second use of the same dye bath (48 hours).

Unfortunately I made the decision to solar dye rather than refrigerate the dye jars. In this nice tropical heat the dye baths fermented and smelt rather like rotten eggs. Not pleasant, but the colours were worth a little nausea!

Pretty Colours

These are all the colours I've developed over the last few months.

Left to Right: 

Tumeric/Tea/Red Cabbage

Portobello Mushroom

Red Cabbage (acidic)

Red Cabbage (neutral)

Red Cabbage (alkaline)

Black Beans (neutral)

Black Beans (alkaline)

Copper (diluted)

Copper (strong)

Copper (very strong with vinegar)

Now I have the colour and they seem to be relatively stable over several months its onto whole skeins! Then I take over the world!

Ignore Everything and Look at Pretty Yarn

Isn't this the most lovely thing you have seen?

I finally made a 'natural' green dye for yarn.

Its magnificent.

Its a celery green colour. Quite vegetal.

I made it from copper, vinegar and lots of time (about 3 months). I'm not sure what the chemical name is for this but I think its Copper Acetate. Not sure if its poisonous, so I wore gloves and rinsed the yarn very well.

The dye is actually a blue green colour but this skein is under-dyed with black tea and so was yellowish. Thus mixing blueish and yellowish I made green.

This is the copper wire soaking in vinegar about 2 months in. You can see the bright blue colour of the vinegar below and the crystals forming on the wire.

This is the copper wire after I took it out after 3 months. After this stage I soaked the wire in a little water to remove the blue from the wire. Worked really nicely.

On the left is yarn that was not under-dyed with anything, its just a natural wool colour. The finished yarn colour is much closer to blue than green.

This was my first experiment with wool in a tiny amount of the blue liquid that showed me that the colour would stick and might produce greens or blues. 

Happiness.

Chroma Chronos I-VI

A while back I posted about a project I was working on, dyeing postcards with tea and matching them with my naturally dyed wools. It was actually for an exhibition called Pameran Poskad which I took part in. The exhibition was held from the 17th April to the 01 May here in Singapore. Anyone could take part so I decided that since it was my new year's resolution to make some art, I would take part. The exhibition was interesting and gathered a huge response from artists from different places around the world. You can see some pictures at the website of works submitted. It was nice for me as a 'little' person to participate with all the 'grown up' artists. And to my surprise I sold 3 of my works! Woo! I'm a selling artist! Hee hee!

Here's what my works were about:

Chroma Chronos was a set of works about time and colour (hence the name chroma=colour, chronos=time (yes its deliberately mis-spelt to emphasis the link between the two)). I wanted to reflect the process, the hidden dimension of the work, which is the time. Each of the four colours on each postcard took up to 2 weeks to develop, meaning that the total time spent for each postcard was up to 8-9 weeks. This is not fast art, not the quick and dirty colour of the inkjet printer, digital photography and the instant download, but the slow, painstaking (and often frustrating) art of time. With time comes colour. The two are tied together. Time itself breathes into these works. The works are circular to reflect the nature of the clocks which rule our days, hands going around and around and around. The circles also stem from my preoccupation with geometry and philosophy (but I wont bore you with that too!). Without further ado, I present Chroma Chronos I-VI:

Someone brought this one

And someone brought this one too

Someone brought the small yellow one too!

Chroma Chronos I - VI

Paper Dyes

Continuing on from my experiments the other day, I've dyed a whole stack of postcards with tea-based natural dyes. The colours are so lovely and turned out really well on the paper as my earlier experiments had indicated they would. Paired with my naturally dyed wools, they look amazing and promise to be something really beautiful...

The naturally dyed postcards with some of my previous woollen experiments.

The postcards alone. Each postcard has a different depth of colour and different dye mark.

Another view of the wool and postcards, just because they are so lovely.

And the balls of wool do remind me of scoops of icecream...

Another sneak peek...

These are two experiments from a new project I'm working on. The left is dyed using black tea, the right is dyed using Starbucks berry tea. The paper is a delicious heavy-weight watercolour paper that absorbs my natural dyes like they were made for each other. The wonderful thing about this paper is that it absorbs the dye over 24 hours without turning into a soggy mush like most paper would. Unfortunately the berry pink doesn't last and it fades to a musty rose brown. Still nice, but not so pretty. Such is the way with berries. Their delights are fleeting!

Other Things I've been up to...

I'm on holiday in Australia for a few weeks seeing family and friends (but the making continues, albeit sporadically)

In a little shop in Daylesford called 'Purls Palace' I found these silk bundles from Morocco for just a few dollars. The grey one I'm planning on combining with some cotton for a bag or cardigan, while the cream ones I'm going to use to experiment with natural dyes. Purls Palace is a gem of a store with lots of interesting craft supplies, finished crafts and a selection of good books. I was planning on visiting a few places in Melbourne while we were there, but run out of time.

The Mr. and I recently celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary and he brought me 5 presents, one for each year. One of them was this lovely box of bird stamps which I have been happily stamping on lots of things. The chaffinch and this cage above are my favourites.


We were in Melbourne for a few days and I did a little shopping. I'm still trying the no shopping thing, but discount designer dresses are too much for me to resist. I have managed to curb my shopping enormously this year though. My dress count is at 8 for the year, with 3 tshirts, 4 pairs of tights and 1 shirt totalling up my buying. I managed to make one dress and one skirt though and a bunch of crochet things, so not toooo bad (trying to justify myself!). (Did I mention that the dresses were silk?! Sooo lovely...)


Since I went on holiday I've been keeping a visual journal. Its been a long time since I drew everyday so I'm having fun. I've just been recording the interesting things we've seen as well as the ordinary and mundane everyday things. It will be a good reminder of this trip after I'm finished as well as being a good exercise to help me slow down!


Puffy scarf is made of New Zealand wool and alpaca that I brought on holiday in Daylesford, Victoria, Australia. I should be buying Australian wool, but this was too nice to resist. Its soft and just the nicest shade of green. The camera doesn't really capture the colour though, its more kermit green than grey green.


The 'Winner's Ribbon Brooches' are the result of a long tiring day, where I was wandering around a shopping center waiting to meet someone and happened upon a shop selling ribbon. This idea had been kicking around in my head for a while, just waiting for the right ribbon. These look good in groups or alone on bags or jackets and are quite unisex. The Mr. requested one for his backpack.

This ceramic birdy makes me almost as happy as real birds. Like the clouds, I wear this on a ribbon as a necklace. I made a lot of these and I will be making them into a mobile at a later date.

Detail of The Caterpillar

As things at work get stressful and I get tired, instead of taking a break and vegging out in front of the tv, I tend to make things at a furious pace. Getting home late one night I decided to make a necklace out of some wooden beads (getting their second use after becoming discoloured and sun damaged) and some old laddered stockings. The result I've nicknamed 'The Caterpillar' for its segmented body and many legs. Its somewhere between necklace and lion's mane when worn.

Shibori

I saw an easy tutorial on the Shibori technique at Burdastyle and had to try it. It turned out rather well, though next time I'll be using thinner cotton and a smaller needle as I have a nice set of decorative holes along with the stripes! I also experimented with dripping candle wax on the fabric to form a resist pattern. Doesn't seem to have been thick enough wax to prevent the dye from seeping through, but I haven't tried boiling the wax away yet. The dye is a vinegar and red wine mix.

Project Mama's Summer Handbag

The skeins, post dye

Wound into balls ready to go

The beginning of the bag

After wrangling with the wool 3 times in the dye bath and it not coming out nicely, I finally had the wool ready to start on the requested bag. I chose a favourite bag pattern from Debbie Stoller's Stitch N Bitch: The Happy Hooker. I'm hoping desperately that I will have just enough wool dyed to finish it!. I have 150g, the pattern asks for 140. I'm to gauge, so it should be fine, but I worry, none-the-less, because its impossible to dye wool exactly the same colour again!

Dye Batch 005

Recently finished batch of experiments. All were mordanted with Alum.

Left to Right Top Row: Red Rambutan Skins 2nd use on Bamboo, Red Rambutan Skins 2nd use on Cotton, Red Rambutan Skins on Wool, Bougainvillea on Soy, Bougainvillea on Wool, Red Rambutan on Bamboo

Left to Right Bottom Row: Black Tea on Wool, Dried Brown Rambutan Skins on Wool & Soy, Black Tea on Soy, Red Rambutan Skins on Soy

How I keep track of what worked and what didn't, what colours work with what mordants, what colours are obtained from various dyestuffs and times

Cotton swatches in my dye journal

Skeins...

foreground to background:

pink - beetroot

grey brown - black tea & wildberry tea

pink beige - beetroot (less alum used)

beige - black tea

yellow - tumeric (1 day in the dye and sun bleached afterwards)

pale yellow - bougainvillea

another closeup of the skeins

skeins of wool post-dye

Some of my first attempts at dyeing whole skeins of wool. These were all 50g balls which I unwound into skeins and tied with cotton threads. The cotton really helped prevent the wool from tangling up during the dye process. The amount of mordant & dyestuff needs to be refined though, as I'm not getting the depth of colour I get with the smaller amounts of wool.

The tea dyes had two rounds of tea each of one week to deepen the colour. I mordanted them again each time. The colours are still quite light though.

I've already started to over-dye again the pale beetroot skeins and the tea ones (for a third time!). I was hoping for a much darker pink on the second beetroot but for some reason the dye just didn't stick. I'm overdying the wildberry tea with more wildberry tea in the hope of a more grey colour. The plain black tea skein is being overdyed with some old red wine and will hopefully yield a darker brown colour.

This process sure encourages patience! Those few skeins are the result of about a month's work.

Latest Batch of Dyes

The greys - dark brown on soy, light grey on wool and lighter grey on bamboo using black tea and iron water as mordant

The yellows - dark orange on soy, light yellow on wool, lemony yellow on bamboo using tumeric and iron water as mordant

Tumeric on cotton fabric with iron water mordant

I've had good success recently with yellows and greys. I'm really happy with the grey I got from iron mordanted wool with black tea.