dyeing with nature

I stumbled across this beautiful and inspiring blog, via Pinterest, called Tinctory .

Eva uses silk and smocking to create beautiful pleated jewellery, but what has inspired me the most is her experiments with natural dying. Once I come back of holiday I will definitely be ordering myself some Japanese indigo plants from here and trying out some of her techniques especially the steam printing and ice flowers.

Painting with dyes

Today I finally got round to painting my sample screen prints with my procion dyes.

I'm really pleased with how the colours have turned out so I'm definitely going to use the same process on my final garment. I will just have to be very careful not to drip any dye by accident whilst I am painting the real thing!

Mixing procion dyes and finalising a colour palette

My colour palette is inspired by the wildflowers on and around my allotment that are in bloom during May. My decision was also influenced by my grandmothers embroidery transfers. I specifically only selected the late spring early summer blooming wild flowers.

The procion dyes that I have mixed for my colour palette are called:

'Leaf Green' and 'Dogrose'

'Lilac'

'Bluebell'

'Buttercup'

I will also using a dark brown called 'Fertile Ground' printing ink for my screen print.

As you can probably see from the top photo the procion dyes show up much better on the unbleached calico, so I have decided to use the unbleached, undyed calico as the fabric for the garment. As a fabric Calico seems a good choice as it is hardwearing and practical. It is also a natural fabric that dyes well and this particular calico is a medium-weight with a tight weave but it still hangs nicely with the pleating at the front of the apron.

I also want to use a selection of green coloured recycled and patchwork fabrics ranging in colour from a fresh leaf green to the dark army green of the land girls uniform.

Tea to dye for

Just before starting this project I was reading a book about gardening called the Morville Year by katherine Swift. (Which I would highly recommend if you are interested in gardening, nature and the history of both. Her first book is the Morville Hours, but personally I found that a little too heavy on history and religion.)

In the book one interesting fact she highlighted was that during WWII damsons were harvested and used to dye the soldiers uniforms khaki colour. So of course I thought it would be a really good to have a go at this, only at the time of doing this project, it is spring, and damson season isn't till late summer.

So I had to think of another way that I could achieve a similar khaki colour with a natural dye that would have been available to households in WWII. Although tea was rationed like many foods, it is well known that 1940s women used cold tea to dye their legs and kohl to draw fake seams to look like silk stockings, of which there was a shortage of.

I decided to try out tea dyeing some calico and cotton voile to see whether it might be a process I could use in my final outcome.

I boiled two teabags in a medium saucepan of water and then simmered two samples for 10 mins and another two for 20 mins.

As you can see from the picture above, the two on the right that were in for the longest are slightly darker in colour. My plan is to either keep the base of the apron dress undyed or to dye the whole thing in tea to give it a khaki colour.

Using Natural Dyes

In my statement I said that I wanted to explore using natural dyes, as this is what nomadic tribes would have traditional used to dye their fabrics. After some research online, I discovered that a lot of the vegetable dyes only create muted colours, and my colour palette is quite vibrant. If I want to create a vibrant pink I would have to buy cochineal (made from a beetle) and cobalt blue is made from an mineral which I would have to buy especially as well. But I did discover that you can make a really vibrant yellow from turmeric -the spice, so using this video to help me, I tried it.

I am really pleased with the results. The dye takes really well onto the cotton scraps I used, even after just being in the mixture for 5 minutes, and being rinsed and squeezed out.

Since this is a natural dye that has been successful, I think I should incorporate it into my final samples in some way.

Batik & Dye

I've been mixing up procion dyes, to the correct colours in my colour palette, today. I think I've managed to get the yellow, pink and red pretty spot on but I am really struggling with the cobalt blue. It looks ok when it's still wet, but when it dries it is always to pale, I can't get it intense enough. The samples below were dyed cold, I tried using them on the heat too, but the results weren't that different.

Last tuesday we had a go at using batik with Charlie. It's something I haven't done since primary school, and to be honest I hadn't magically got much better than primary school standard!

These are the samples I ended up with. As you can see clearly with the pink sample, there was quite a lot of accidental dripping involved, so much in fact that I ended up trying to incorporate spots into the design! On the red sample, I tried to recreate a check design, inspired by the blankets worn by the Maasai tribe. I quite like the way it turned out, so I tried out again today on a larger scale.

image from here

I was a lot neater this time, I used a brush instead of the traditional Tjanting, and I used a piece of card as a guide for the lines, and to protect the fabric from drips.

I like the imperfect effect that the wax resist gives. I know I'll have to work into a bit more though, maybe I can use a reverse appliqué technique - cutting out the squares in between the checks and putting some cobalt blue fabric behind and stitching into it?