Adventures in Indigo dying.

True Indigo: Indigofera tinctoria

Woad:  Isatis tinctoria

I've been playing with indigo again the last few weeks, getting ready to weave some viking fabric. I'm not an avid dyer. I'm more of a persistent dabbler. I am competent with acid dyes, and happy to use them if I can't get the color of fabric I want. I really enjoy natural dying, but haven't had as much time, or really the motivation to single mindedly investigate it. I tend to dye for a specific end result. I design a garment, research what colors it might have been in at that time and place in history, then find out what dyestuffs they were using in that time and culture, and try to use those if I can get them, and if they are reliable. There are some exceptions. Lichen dyes are not
sustainable, so  I tend to skip to something else for purple. I don't care to work with copper and tin salts with small children in the house, so prefer to use things I can mordant with iron and alum. Dying is one of the oldest crafts in existence, and if you don't care as much about replicating the method exactly, between finds of actual dye plants in archaeological contexts, and chemical testing of dyed cloth, there's a rich historical record. If you're dying to replicate something, it's fairly easy to pick materials, because there's thousands of years of preference to note which colors are light and wash fast, and which give the clearest, brightest colors. Of this historical dyes, indigo and woad are the only reliable source for good blues. As such they're a indispensable part of the natural dyers arsenal, but the process is kind of a lot of chemistry (and has a reputation for being finicky), which I think throws a lot of potential dyers off.

Most natural dyes form a chemical bond with the proteins in wool or silk either because the dystuff itself is rich in a substance that allows the color to bind to the protein (like the tannins in black walnuts), or by the intermediary intervention of a metal salt: alum, tin, copper, or iron. Indigo and Woad on the other hand make a mechanical bond with the fiber, which is why they work so well on cellulose fibers that many other dyes have trouble sticking to. You use a chemical process to shrink the dye molecule and force it out of suspension and into solution. Then you dip your material to be dyed. When you take it out, the oxygen reacts with the indigen, re enlarging the molecule and permanently tangling it in the fiber. The oxidation also turns the dye blue! The process is just really very different from other dye processes: from how you get the dye to a state where it will give a washfast color, to how you actually dye the material (no simmering here! the maximum that you dip the material is 5-10 minutes in a nearly exhausted pot. I've never gone more than five. You get darker colors by successive layers, not by longer processing.)

It's a little like magic really: You pull the skeins out of the dye bath looking like dirty yellow and as the dye drains off of them they turn brilliant blue. It makes me feel a little like an enchantress every time I do it!

Indigo and woad plants don't give up their color easily! You get the indigen out of the plant by a fermentation process. I don't do this part, because it's smelly, time consuming, and requires the ability to keep a big stinky vat at warm temperatures (so stinky that Queen Elizabeth banned the construction of woad dying within a certain radius of her residences). It's not impossible, but I'd rather save my time for something else, and buy the pre fermented powdered product. (Persistent Dabbler.) I've gotten this both from Dharma Trading (who also carries the chemicals you need, and provides great customer support if you run into trouble with your dye vat) and from The Yarn Tree, who sources theirs from a social enterprise in Bangledesh. The Yarn tree indigo didn't dissolve as completely (there were some gritty particles in the bottom of the dye bath), but did seem to give really good color.

This is the best reduction I've ever gotten. Probably it should
go a little more yellow, it's still got a tinge of green to it.
You can see the somewhat mettalic/blue slick on top of the
dye here. I've not completely gotten rid of that ever. I tend to
sort of sweep it off with a paper towel before dying.

 After you have your indigen extracted from your plant, or your powder mixed into your dye bath, you are not ready to dye. What you have is dye particles suspended  in water, what you NEED is dye particles in solution. Indigen is grumpy about going into solution. The process works best at a PH of about 10, which is usually achieved by the application of soda ash. I do this by weight, and then by watching the dye bath, but the clever well prepared dyer can also use ph test strips. Then you use Thioruea Dioxide, added a little bit at a time, with 15 minute waits between additions, to force the dye into solution. The process of forcing the dye into solution is called "reducing' the dye bath. When the dye bath is ready, it will be bright yellow or yellow green and translucent.

This all sounds like it should involve test tubes and lab coats and whatnot, but what it really means is mixing a teaspoon of Thiourea Dioxide into hot water in a mason jar. Bringing your dye bath up to 125-150 degrees F. Adding half the dissolved thiorea. Stirring GENTLY (because oxygen forces the dye back out of solution). Waiting fifteen minutes: checking the color of the dyebath, and repeating pretty much interminably. With or without supplementary and unflattering muttering about the dyepot and/or the life choices that led you to dye with indigo in the first place.

Once it finally reduces you can run test skeins (presoaked) to see how long you need to dip! Never more than 5 minutes in a fresh pot, if you leave it in too long the color won't tend to be wash fast but will "crack" and slough off, turning you blue every time you handle it. these little samples were 30 seconds, 1 minute, and 2 minutes. I ended up dying my first dip 3 minutes, and my second dip almost four, as the dye bath was starting to run down. You can REALLY see the blue oxidized skin over the dyebath here (this was foamy skin because I had let it get too close to boiling) I skim that off with a paper towel, because it's almost oily, and if you don't get rid of it, it coats the fibers on the way into the dyebath and they don't come into uniform contact  with the dye (learned THAT the hard way).

Then dye! It pays to be careful here, you want to stir as little as possible and allow as little dripping into the pot as possible. Basically anything that will introduce oxygen is to be avoided. I pull the skeins out, let them stream into the pot, with the tip of the skein basically touching the pot, then wring them out over a second pot, and hang them on a line to oxidize fully. When I'm totally done dying, I pour the oxidized dye from the pot I wrung the skeins into back into the indigo vat. I ALWAYS do the actual dying outside. (another thing I learned the hard way) because drips are basically unavoidable, particularly as you need to spread the wet skeins out to contact the oxygen, and the drips stain most things. (I'm typing with blue fingernails at the moment....) Also it smells like boiling rotting plants.

Spread out to oxidize! straight indigo, indigo overdyed over Weld, and the bright screaming yellow is weld. 

 Once your dye has oxidized it can be sent back in for another dip if you want darker results, or even a couple more dips. Then you have the normal post dye routine: rinse, wash with syntrhapol (I use the Dharma brand) to remove any un bonded dye (so your fabric doesn't turn you BLUE). then rinse till the water is clear, and I send it through the spin cycle to speed dying. A retayne soak can be used right after it comes off the pot, I've done it in the past. I didn't this time, I don't have enough data from using the dyed material to know if this is worth it yet.

Finished dye (mostly finished. I decided some of the indigo skeins were blotchy/lighter and sent them in for another dip. also that one noticeably yellow green skein got re-dipped)

Things I learned: you have to tie indigo skeins far more loosely than you do simmering type dyes. you're depending on rapid, even dye absorption into the fibers, and evidently ties that are loose enough for simmering dyes, are tight enough to leave light spots on indigo skeins.You can't throw the whole lot in at once like you can when you do simmering type dying. anything RESEMBLING crowding in the pot means that you get light spots. I ended up finding that two of these skeins at a time was just right. You don't want to stir in a way that folds in oxygen, but you do want to kind of, swish the skeins back and forth under the dye to make sure that the dye has penetrated the interior of the skeins. Keep some thiourea dioxide dissolved in water handy and watch the color of your dye bath if you're doing a lot of dying. if the color starts to go green? Add some thiorea, and wait ten minutes for it to settle. It's worth how much of a pain it is in consistency of color (the green means that dye is oxidizing and therefore becoming unavailable to bond with your fiber, so in addition to removing dye from the bath on the skeins, you're making some of it unavailable, so your vat start unexpectedly producing a much lighter shade.) . The good news is, even my blotchy skeins came out pretty well after another trip through the pot, so most problems are non fatal if you're erring on the side of light, rather than dark.


The best news is, once you've got your vat going once, it's more amicable to keeping going. you can store it in a sealed bucket, stir it every so often, and it will last for months! if it's getting light, add some more indigo powder mixed into water, and as it oxidizes you add more thiourea to reduce it.

This is just me fuddling through the process with the aid of the dharma dying tutorials, plus troubleshooting help from the dharma staff. there are entire books devoted to indigo dying (Dharma sells a couple that look interesting), and if you want to be more than a persistent dabbler, that's probably a good investment! 

The Queen's Gift

This spring I was infected with a case of helium hand, and voluneered to make the queens gift for my embroider's guild. The queens gift is given by the keepers of Athena's Thimble to each queen around the time she steps down, as a tribute to her and her service. I had a glorious and terrible idea for something the at the time princess might like, and therefore, under the influence of caffeine and terrible ideas, raised my hand.

I've long been inspired by this lovely bog dress: the original was woven in a contiguous tube and fastened at the shoulder by brooches. it looks a lot like a roman chiton, which frequently had decorative bands at both the folded hem and the bottom hem. I had the thought of adding wide embroidered bands at the hems. The queen's favor is based on a pictish rune stone, so there was a ready source of designs. I decided I wanted to showcase the wide variety of pictish beasties on the rune stones in the pattern, a wide trim at the bottom hem, and a narrower band across the breast featuring the princess's two tailed mermaids at the center front and back, and some celtic knotwork roses symbolizing her status as a lady of the rose.

First I had to choose a fabric and techniques. The original gown is in wool, and I wanted to use wool for this one, but light enough that she could wear it in the summer. I also wanted to use purple, which was a color reserved for royalty in ancient Ireland (according to ye ancient irish bard of incredible helpfulness, Aife, who was my adviser in all matters ancient ireland for this entire project, and saved me innumerable hours of research and dead ends. ) I decided on a summer weight, almost sheer wool and that I could dye to get the correct color. Although Lichen dying has been a long time interest of mine, a little research showed it to be problematic. Aside from the fact that lichen dyes are notoriously difficult to get light fast, there is the problem with sustainability. It's generally recommended that lichen dying only be used for small projects or samples, because harvesting destroys the plant, which does not regenerate. I decided that I could use acid dyes to achieve the color I wanted. The fabric, a white wool crepe, was donated by a very generous patron.

I decided to use mounted bands of embroidery, worked in wool on lightweight linen, both to make working the embroidery more portable and convenient, and to hide the messy backside of the work. The additional benefit is that HRH can transfer the bands to another garment if she should so wish.

Rune stones of all sorts have been a long time fascination of mine, so it was fun to have an excuse to look at a lot of them. I spent a very enjoyable afternoon stalking museum collections and saving images, I came up with a large number of different wonderful patterns and beasts. In fact the most difficult part was deciding which ones to leave off.

I drew my chosen desings on a long strip of butchers paper, 7.5 inches wide, by 96 inches long. I centered a rose with a celtic knot detail at the four quarters, and bracketed it with sea serpents front and back. Then positioned a pair of animals in each space. Some of the animals had to be slightly altered to fit the space, particularly the gryphon: who was squashed into a long narrow border space, and the merhorses: which were entwined vertically, not horizontally. I then drew on the back of the paper with a heat transfer marker. This was my first time using this method of transfer, and I'm very pleased with it for this kind of work, although the line is fairly fat, so it's not a one size fits all solution. Working with it is a lot like working with the metallic paint pens, where you shake to mix the ink, then depress the tip to start the flow. I found it had the same weakness as those pens, after a while of use the tip starts to dry up, or the ink to separate again, so you have to occasionally shake the pen up and re-depress the tip to keep the ink flowing well. After i did the first transfer, I could tell where the pen had gotten a little dry because it didn't transfer as darkly. I ended up gong over the lighter areas with my fine tip sharpie to get clearer lines. The second transfer I worked I watched to be sure the ink was going on thickly enough, and shook/re inked the tip as necessary, and got very even dark transfer lines.

 I had ordered silver thread for the detail work, and appleton's crewel wool for the bodies. I've used appleton's before and it's my favorite. very fine, very uniform. I worked the outlines in stem stitch in charcoal, which i thought would give a slightly softer look than true black, then mounted the embroidery in a hoop and started the long process of the bayuex stitch filling.

I started with the roses which I did not do in bayuex totally. I worked the edges in stem, as seen in small areas on the bayeux tapestry. Then filled the petals interior with satin stitch, and held it down with the silver metallic couched down with silk thread. I'm really liking working with better metallic thread. it's still a giant pain, but it's considerably less painful than the cheap stuff. This from Kyoto Embroidery is reasonably priced, and comes from japan in a lot of weights and colors.





Then I did the bracketing sea serpents, working the bellies in bayeux, and then filling the backs with satin and couching it down with a lattice.






Then it was on to the rest of the animals. First filling in the accent or shading areas, very small or wiggly areas with stem stitch, and blocks with more bayux (antlers are stem. colored areas are bayeux. the shading on the legs/belly was achieved by alternating threads of black and brown before couching over it with brown.






Then filling in the background color











Then repeat with the next animal.....












I had lots of help from his royal puttyness, in a supervisory and thread warming role......

     

Finally finished! 

With the hem done, I scoured the white wool crepe with dharma textile detergent (a synthrapol alternative) and got out my patent pending dying rig for large batches: a large steel garbage can, that I put on my big outdoor propane burner. I have an old shovel handle that's a perfect stirring device. I got lucky with this dye job: I was rushing, trying to watch the kids and work, and had a head cold when I did this. I made a paste with the dye powder and water, stirred in more water slowly, but neglected to strain this mixture into the dye pot. Just, dumped it in then added presoaked fabric. When I stirred? little clumps of dye all over the fabric. It hadn't all dissolved. I spent the next half an hour elbow deep in the scalding water, scrubbing little spots of undisolved dye so they'd dissolve in the hot water. Between that, and the glauber's salt I added to keep it level, amazingly the dye job is perfectly even. However, not at ALL the color I was expecting out of "purple haze." thankfully, while it's not Lichen purple, it is (as pointed out to me by BestLaurel when I panic messaged her) shoo in for tyrean purple, and very pretty. I called it a happy accident and went with it.

thankfully the bog dress is just a tube, so it's a matter of sewing rectangles together with a reversible seam (in this case flat felled). I felt rather badly for mounting this much work on a machine sewn dress, but at this point I was rapidly approaching deadline and slightly panicked, so I swallowed my scruples and moved on to mounting the hem. FirstI pinned the SNOT out of it, and machine sewed it to the bottom edge of the dress. Because my slate frame was occupied I did this on a round frame, and it DID allow the fabric to pucker a little. Lesson learned, next time just suck it up and take the other project off the slate frame (or you know, buy a second slate frame??) You just don't get as even of tension on larger projects on the circular cross stitch frames, and they don't grip evenly if you're expecting them to grip over bumpy areas (like previously embroidered figures).

then flip it up, and more pinning! Crepe is stupidly stretchy, and doesn't want to stay put)

I worked over the edges with couched silver thread. This thread comes in skeins, and I've found that toilet paper rolls, or better yet, sections of stiffer paper towel tubes, work great to wind them onto. It's big enough in diameter that the thread doesn't get kinks, and you can make a slit in the end to catch the thread, because metallic is SUPER springing and will basically leap off the roll. then I bound the top edge with a strip of blue, and sewed the edge of that down with couched silver.  At this point I called it done enough, because I wasn't sure if I started the mermaid on the top, I would be able to finish it before the event.

Front, the mermaid will be centered on the fold down portion, with a pair of
crescent moon and V rods. 

Side

Back

I was really pleased to be able to do this for the guild and for the queen! She really liked it as it was, but I did end up bringing it home to finish putting the mermaid on the front. 

The deputy guildmistress and I present the gift in court. Photo Credit Cataline la Broderesse

The best thing is having something you made make someone else happy!  (Photo credit Cataline La Broderesse) 

Spanish Traveling cloak (or the cloak of poor choices)

I decided in January that this was going to be the year when I finally entered SCA arts and sciences competitions, and to pursue that goal, I was FINALLY going to work on some more difficult fleece to garment projects. I've had a few of them lurking half researched in the corners of notebooks for a few years now. I tend to be so buried in Needs sewing, that i don't get around to doing projects that force me to work to my capacity, stretch my skills and grow as an artisan. I've been doing that in a small way, by learning new embroidery things for Athena's thimble, and it's been very satisfying, but I wanted to do it with more than embroidery, which kind of necessarily means larger scale projects. Competing gives me an excuse for that.

The first of these projects was my planned winter project for this year, a hand woven, hand embroidered hooded cloak for the husbeast to wear at chilly events like 100 minutes. My plan was to make as exact of a reproduction as possible of this "spanish style" cloak in the Germanisches National Museum.

This cloak is white twill wool, heavily fulled, embroidered with couched work in brown wool, and decorated with tassels and "bobbles" on the hood. Because white isn't a really PRACTICAL color for a cloak at events that may be say, muddy, I decided to do mine in natural brown wool with madder dyed accents.

Because I started it later than I wanted to and only had 6 weeks to work on it before the competition, I finished this with scaled back embroideries for entry into Keepers of the Central Flame, an East Kingdom arts and sciences competition that was hosted by my home barony, concordia of the snows. For that I did a VERY comprehensive write up of my research and the process. So if you want to read a 20 page research paper about it, Here's a linky! I'm hoping to finish the embroideries and enter it in the display at pennsic this summer, so keep your eyes open for "finished" pictures of the husbeast modeling it! Here's a bunch of the process photos and pictures of my display for your enjoyment. this was a real stretch project and I learned a lot. I can't WAIT to take what I've learned and start something new!

weaving in progress, you can see my measuring tool pinned to the left selvedge, just a strip of fabric a yard long that helps me keep track of larger projects.

Entire project may be hell, but that's a fine straight selvedge!

Cut from the loom, but not yet fulled.

Fulled down, I used an entire inch per foot of width in shrinkage and could've used more (or used more ends per inch in the sett to begin with.)

edge blanket stitched in weaving thread, and the 6 strand braid being applied

Starting the crossed blanket stitch hem. You can see the front facing flap that will be turned back along the line of crossed blanket stitch. This doesn't serve the usual purpose of a facing (to cover a raw edge) but rather firms up the front edge so it hangs nicely.

spacing all the "rays" which are self applique pieces, and basting them down.  I was confused. why applique something in a way in which you can't even tel lit's there? Well those pieces are all cut on the straight of the grain with the grain running vertically through the ray. sewn onto the partially bias semi circular cape, they act like a support scaffold and force it to hang evenly all the way round, and drape beautifully from the neck. 

Starting the hood marking. 

Rays all appliqued. 

This is cross stitch worked over 3 strand braid. some of the points are wonky. if I had it to do again I'd baste both sides of the rays down with the weaving thread (so it didn't have to be removed) and THEN do the cross stitch. That'd keep everything from getting funny. 

Hood totally marked and working on the couching.

Hood finished and lined with the bobbles mounted! Getting there! 

The home stretch, marking the fronts: first with prick and pounce, then with thinned whit gouache.

On the stand at competition! 

The finished hem. You can't see the stabelizing blanket stitch in the weaving thread under the crossed blanket.

Some of my display. The husbeast made me the wonderful wood display cards for my threads.