handspun yarn – Ink, Yarn & Beer

Natural Dyeing: Mordanting

Setting Up

It is a bright, crisp spring morning, perfect weather for mordanting outdoors. The stainless steel dyeing pots have been pulled out, scales, yarn, alum and tartaric acid, buckets, goggles, gloves, basins, buckets, towels, thermometer, mixing bowls and spoons. First to be set up was a kettle of water to heat on the burner. Next, 100 g. of wool weighed out, and set to soak in hot water. On the smaller scale, a plastic bowl was set down, and then turned on to set the tare weight to zero. 5 g. tartaric acid weighed and emptied into a stainless steel bowl. 10 g. alum weighed out, and added to the bowl with the tartaric acid. Hot water added to this to dissolve the crystals. Meanwhile, I continued to organize a few things as the water heated.

Weighing

Having two different scales, one for large items and one for small, is great. These are the scales Josh uses in brewing, to weigh grain and hops. The large one does both pounds and kg and g, while the other one does tenths of a gram, along with other weighting systems.

Traditional natural dyes have an alum-to-wool weight ratio of 1:4. This means for every pound of wool, 1/4 lb. alum is to be used, or for every 100 g. of wool, 25 g. of alum is to be used. Most books warn you not to use too much alum as it makes the wool sticky. It does, and it is a really disgusting feeling. Nor can you fix the problem.

Trudy van Stralen, author of Indigo, Madder, and Marigold recommends using a 1:10 ratio of alum to wool, and a 1:20 ratio of tartaric acid to wool. Now, trying to figure this out in pounds is absurd, and this is where the beauty of the metric system really shines. It means for 100 g. of wool, the alum proportion is 10 g, and the tartaric acid is 5 g. If this is confusing, just think of it in terms of U.S. money – $1.00 = 100 g, a dime is 10 g., and of course a nickel is 5 g.

Van Stralen also recommends using the same water and the same solution for subsequent batches of wool, saving time in heating up water, and saving money by only adding 5% more alum and 2.5% tartaric acid back to the mordant bath. Appeals to me!

Mordants-to-Wool Ratio

My first batch of mordanting wool had plenty of room in the kettle, so for the second batch, I weighed out more wool. This time it was 260 g. Using the 10% rule would give me 26 g. of alum; the 5% rule of tartaric acid would be 13 g. Given the idea that there is essentially 5% and 2.5% of alum and tartaric acid respectively remaining in the mordanting kettle, I went with an approximation of 7.5% for the alum, which was 20 g, and 3.75% for the tartaric acid, which is 10 g. I added these to the mordant water to accommodate the larger amount of fiber. I still won’t have 25% alum to wool in weight, so there should be no stickiness problem. The rest of the wool will be weighed out in 260 g batches, so it should go more quickly. If I didn’t do this, I think I could easily spend the whole day mordanting; I’d rather do it in half the time!

For all of these, the water is not boiling, but holding steady at about 200 F. The wool skeins did not get agitated by roiling water. The commercial skeins have held their crisp twist, and the handspun ones did not exit the mordant bath any more felted than they were prior to entering it.

Premordanting for Indigo?

I don’t have any idea if indigo will be affected by an alum-tartaric acid premordant, but as I figure I will be overdyeing some of my future indigo wool with quercitron, for green, and cochineal for purples, premordanting the wool could only help. That is something to be seen in the future.

Comment

The last time I used natural dyes and mordants was ages ago. I used pounds and ounces, cups and teaspoons. The metric system is far easier than the English system! I am looking forward to the results as van Stralen uses a higher concentration of dyestuff to goods; this is my plan for this adventure.

I really like van Stralen’s book because of the clear and colorful illustrations. My own small dyeing library has old and new books in it. The different approaches to mordanting and to dyeing are interesting to read, as are the approaches to dyeing.

I’ve done the one-pot-dye-and-mordant approach, which is really time efficient, but perhaps not efficient in the use of chemicals and dye materials. There is also the added nuisance of having to pull twigs and flowers out of the wool. I am hoping to avoid this, and am trying to decide if I should get some mesh bags to contain the dye materials if I cannot grind them up finely enough.

A lot of the books from the 70s use the all-in-one method. Liles book is very specific. Others are vague. For Californians, Ida Grae’s Nature’s Colors is a must-have – too many books seem to think that the entire U.S. lives on the east coast!

This round of natural dyeing is a bit more systematic compared to my usual approach to dyeing. I’m interested in seeing the results of this. Because there is time involved here, it makes sense to heed what I am doing. And, as it is also an artistic experience, I find myself contemplating what I might do with this batch of yarn or that. For instance, the Shetland is being considered for – what else? – a Shetland sweater vest. This means I can use colors and more colors, but there will be (in theory) an underlying harmony from both the moorit fleece, and the natural dyes themselves.

Final Notes

Before you begin any dyeing – natural, unnatural – I cannot emphasize enough the importance of skeining your yarn properly. Even if it comes in a commercial skein with a few ties, it most likely will not be enough. I tied off a few extra figure-eight ties on the Sea Wool, but that was not sufficient. Some tangling resulted. For my handspun, I did my usual, and placed eight ties throughout the skein. My skeiner creates skeins which are 1 yard long, so I have six feet to play with. I find that I can have very minimal tangling if I adhere to eight ties, and 3 figure-eights per tie. A lot of work, but it is more work to untangle a skein. The alpaca and Blue Faced Leicester, being very fine yarns, probably should have had even more ties.

Below is a table of my weights of fiber and mordants. This could be a handy thing for me to refer to later on!

Batch	Wool Weight (g)	Alum Weight (g)	Tartaric Acid (g)	Comments
1	105 Sea Wool	10	5	10% / 5% for initial pot.
2	260 Sea Wool	20	10	Did 7.5% / 3.75% as this was a larger amount than put in pot. 200^oF.
3	215 handspun, alpaca, Blue Face Leicester	11	5.5	Pot boiled. Skeins got tangled. 5% / 2.5%. 200^oF.
4	220 handspun moorit Shetland	11	5.5	Came out nice. 5% / 2.5%. 200^oF.
5	280 handspun moorit Shetland	14	7	Water color rather lightly olive colored. 5% / 2.5%. 200^oF.

Natural Dyeing: Preparations

Several years ago I did a lot of dyeing of handspun yarn using natural dyes. I picked plants along the trails when I went hiking and bought others mail order. I grew coreopsis, and experimented with different ones from my flower and vegetable beds. I mordanted with alum, chrome, and saddened in an old cast iron kettle. Lately, my interest in natural dyeing has been reawakened, and so I have started the process. This time, though, I am premordanting all my yarn, instead of doing a one-pot mordant-and-dye extravaganza.

I have pulled out a lot of odd bits of yarn, some colored, some not, some handspun, some commercially spun. I spent the morning skeining them up and washing them twice in very hot, soapy water (how I love Dawn for grease removal!), rinsed them, and now have them hanging up to dry. The house is filled with the sweet smell of clean, fresh wool.

Starting from the left I have handspun Finn-Lincoln, then handspun moorit Shetland, commercially spun lace-weight alpaca, commercially spun 2-ply Blue Faced Leicester, a couple of small skeins of handspun, and then seven skeins of Sea Wool in natural or cream. These will all be premordanted in a 10% alum, 5% tartaric acid solution per dry (or nearly dry) weight of yarn.

I plan to use mostly cochineal, black oak bark (quercitron), indigo, and brazilwood. Some will be overdyed, others will be dipped in ammonia or vinegar after baths, some will have a tin post-mordant. Not quite sure yet of all the details. I also plan on a copper penny blue vat, most likely for the alpaca. I have some tubing Josh has used for his wort cooler. The color focus will be on blue and violet colors, though others are not out of the question.

From Left to Right: Alpaca, Blue Faced Leicester, Handspun

In the links area I’ve added a number of natural dyeing sites I found interesting, as well as a list of books in PDF format from Spin-Off Magazine.

Thockies, i

Recently, I bought some lovely vegetable dyed Finn sheep yarn from Leena Riihelä in Finland; her company is Riihivilla. She blogs and writes in both Finnish and English. Her service, communication, packaging, colors and yarns are fabulous! She also designs mittens and other items, and sells complete kits with enough yarn to complete the project.

I chose her purple colorway, dyed with cochineal and Japanese indigo, which consists of three skeins in three colors. Two of the colors are solid, a rather deep wine rather than violet, and they are different in shade so that when knitted, there will be definite color contrasts. The third skein is multicolor, and ranges in violets to the reds of the solid skeins. Together, the three are very attractive and coordinate well. My plan for them is to make socks, but I want something that will help set the colors up to be seen and appreciated. Because these colors are so beautiful and the yarn is so nice, they definitely need something special to show them off!

My first inclination was to pull out some white sock yarn close to the Finn in weight, but the white was a very bright white, and rather harsh a contrast as far as I was concerned. I thought maybe black, but that was too grim. Other considerations were a warm cream color or a heathery grey, such as found in natural sheep wool colors. As I’ve been spinning for years, I rummaged through my handspun stash, singles and plied, and came across a large ball of 2-ply in a light grey.

The ball I’d wound the yarn into was falling apart, so I decided to rewind it into new, tidy balls. This is when I realized that the yarn as it was would not work. For a while, I was into making very fine, very softly spun yarn, to ply together with the goal of cobweb or lace weight yarn, and this yarn is representative of that time period. Rewinding it into new balls brought out the fact the yarn was weak – the spin too soft – and it would break apart – really, just slide apart – as I was rewinding it.

Given the time it takes to spin up yarn, I decided to recycle it by plying it into a 4-ply with a tighter twist, and a lot of knots. I can always weave in ends where I untie the knots. The result is a very twisty, fine 4-ply which is about the same width as the Finn. As I write this, the final skein (185 yds) is soaking in warm water with hair rinse before it is hung to dry and set the new twist.

Meantime, as the grey yarn dries, I plan to design a sock which will show off each of the three colors in a stripey way, with a pattern of some variety in there using the grey yarn.