Bottom: Iron mordant adjunct
Middle: Copper mordant adjunct
Top: Aluminum Sulfate adjunct
Jar: Bubbling lake pigment
Left corner: Used sandpaper
I have a potato phone.
But they are all peachy colours. The jar is stained red from other dyes, it doesn’t come out.
Wool roving usually starts to felt during this process, I have carders to fluffy it back up after.
Don’t do it.
It made my whole kitchen smell like old eggs and the colour just wasn’t worth it, and that was before the aluminum sulfate.
But I’ll probably try it again with different wools and mordants…
Anyway, I peeled about 300g from paper birch trees (respectfully, a little bit from each tree,) and soaked it in water for two days. Then, I simmered it on low heat a couple hours, let stand another day (I was busy) then added about 50g wool I’d mordanted with soda ash.
The wool simmered for a couple hours then sat in the dye bath for another day. After that, I rinsed, tried some different mordants, then added aluminum sulfate solution in water to the dye bath to extract the rest of the pigment… which really made it smell like rotten eggs. I’m in the frozen north with my door wide open, now.
Maybe I’ll try again in the summer time.
I’ll break down and recycle the spent bark into paper as well. Stay tuned for that.
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So, if I’m understanding correctly, you’re making some dyed fiber with birch and wool? Is the final product supposed to make like a skein or…? I enjoy your post but I don’t understand all the words (like carders or mordant) and what’s going on.
Oh, yes. Okay… some explanation. Sometimes I forget not everyone is as absorbed into this stuff as I am.
Wool carders come in quite a few different varieties, they have surfaces covered with tiny pins to pull the wool back into roving, where all the fibres are loose, but aligned in the same direction. I use handheld ones that look like pet brushes.
A mordant is any chemical that helps the dye adhere to the wool, usually a metallic salt. I make my own by letting different metals decompose in cleaning vinegar - like just stuffing a bunch of steel wool into a jar with the vinegar. An adjunct is just a mordant used after dyeing instead of before.
I make natural dyes, using the wool for felting projects, mostly. I use either felting needles, which are specialized to pull the wool together so it locks into a solid mass, or wet felting — a process of using soap, water and rubbing to do the same thing.
Occasionally I spin with a drop spindle, a very basic handheld spinning device, but I probably won’t be turning this batch into yarn.
Wow, really really cool! Thank you for your explanation. I’ll keep a watchful eye on your posts, this is some serious awesomeness going on there, even if the smell of awesomeness is sometimes rotten eggs.
And thank you! I love to share this stuff. Feel free to post any of your projects here, too.
It was the worst dye smell I have ever smelled… so far. The ghost of it lingers as I type this.