Madder Root

A few weeks ago, I did my spring garden clean-up. And in pulling out the dead stalks from the madder plants, I accidentally pulled up a bit of a root as well. I thought you'd like to see it ... vibrantly orange/red, glinting with bits of soil.




I managed to get one madder seed to germinate in 2009, and it grew into a wild, tangled patch over the last few years (for evidence: see the 2010, 2011 updates). If it weren't contained in a whiskey barrel, it would have taken over that corner of the garden!

Madder needs at least three years to grow before you're supposed to harvest the roots for dyeing. This should be the summer of harvest. To be honest, I kind of lost my fervor for natural dyeing. But perhaps it'll be the excitement of these madder roots that will bring it back ...

natural dyeing with pecans

Once upon a time, I had a favorite white sweater. It was a roll-neck pullover from J.Crew in soft cotton and cashmere.


But favorite white sweaters tend to become careworn. Seams came undone. Stitches unraveled. Stains materialized.

I used my tidiest skills to make physical repairs, but the faint yellow under the arms and a stubborn dot of a coffee stain on the chest meant that the white sweater never came out of the drawer for the past two years. It made me sad everytime I spied it, because I knew it had a lot of life left in it.


What's a girl to do? Well, an idea came to me recently when we had to prune a branch off of our pecan tree. I plucked all the unripe pecans off of it and put them in one of my dyeing buckets. After snapping this photo, I bashed and bruised them with a wooden post (very cathartic, must say) and covered them with water to soak for a week.


I washed the sweater to make sure that it was as clean as it could be. And then when I was finally ready to start the dyeing, I soaked it in cool water for about an hour to make sure that the fibers were fully saturated.


Meanwhile, this is what had become of the soaking pecan hulls. The water had become a thickened, slightly frothy yellow-brown. Slow, fermenting soaks like this can have an "ick" factor. But I find them very earthy and satisfying, and so much easier than hot dyeing, when I have to haul heavy pots around on the stove. This just happens in buckets in a corner of my backyard.


For cold dyeing, especially with plant fibers, you typically need a long soak. The wet sweater went into the strained dye liquor and stayed in for almost two days, with repeated airings (which I'll explain below). During the daytime, I'd move it around every few hours to try to make the dyeing more even. During the nighttime, though, it would stay in one spot for 10-12 hours, so that some spots ended up darker than others. If I'd really wanted it to be even, I would've removed it at night. But, well, I relish the wabi-sabi quality of the uneven dyeing (and in real life, the variation does seem a bit softer).


The one thing I wish is that I had taken process photos of the dyeing. There is definitely something curious going on with the oxidation and pecan hull dye. Since I haven't seen anyone else write about it, you'll get my full description.


The dye liquor was yellowish to start, and in the first couple of hours of dyeing, the sweater was taking on a light yellow-brown hue, except for the underarms, which were turning orangeish (probably due to the aluminum salts in deodorant, which were basically an inadvertent mordant!). It was hideous.

I pulled the sweater out of the dyebath to reconsider, and while it was in the air, over the course of maybe an hour or so, the color of the sweater was transformed. It darkened, deepened, and became more reddish rather than yellowish. This was really a shock.

I've dyed with dozens of natural dyes -- leaves, flowers, barks, and bugs -- and the only other one that you see this kind of real-time, color-changing oxidation process with is indigo, which is in its own category of natural dye because the chemistry is so different (basically, the pigment needs to be in a reduced and alkaline solution in order to be in a dissolved form that can adhere to the fiber. You carefully lower the fiber into the bath so that you don't introduce air, and then when you remove it, and the pigment hits the air and oxidizes, the fiber turns from greenish-yellow to blue).

The process of repeated airings not only changed the color of the sweater, but over time it introduced a lot of air into the dyebath itself, and that became a darker reddish brown as well. It was fascinating. Wild and crazy times with natural dyeing!

growing madder

Today was a gardening day. I thought I'd share with you the full extent of my dye garden: one rambling madder plant


Last spring, I had exceedingly ambitious plans for a dye garden. I planted woad, lady's bedstraw, madder, kota, and dyer's coreopsis. Between the arid air, the harsh sun, and the insects, only a single madder plant made it to maturity.

But that one plant is thriving. It survived last summer and stayed green through the winter freezes, and it's been growing like mad (ha!) this spring and summer.


It's completely filled the whiskey barrel and is overflowing with spindly stalks and scratchy leaves. I must say, it's not a very appealing plant. But it makes my heart swell when I peek underneath the plant and see those ruddy roots, knowing that they'll one day be simmered up into a earthy brew of orange dye:


Madder plants need to be at least three years old before you can harvest them for the roots, so this plant has one more year to go. I'm trying to encourage the stems to set more roots by layering them under the soil here and there where they flop on the ground. With luck, I'll have madder for years to come!

autumn colors

I got a precious dose of autumn this weekend on another visit to Lower Devil's Canyon. The seasonal changes in the desert proper are subtle, too subtle for a newcomer like me to appreciate. But the creek running through the canyon was another story.


Ok, it's still subtle by my Vermont standards, but out here it's nothing to sniff at! I practically jumped for joy when I crossed the creek and found a tangle of fiery Virginia Creeper on the rocks ...


And as my fellow climbers hiked up to the rock towers, I held back, skulking around the riparian zone, gazing at the Sycamore trees and wild grape leaves.


Back at home, I had another kind of autumnal color waiting for me in my dyeing pot. I've been hankering to get back to dyeing -- spurred by the Taos dye workshop and the recent snap of cooler evenings -- and I finally got out my dye pots over the weekend.


Left to right: pecan hulls, apricot leaves, persimmon leaves, peach leaves, and eucalyptus. The peach leaves are from a neighbor, but the pecan, apricot, persimmon, and eucalyptus are from trees in our own yard.

I've done a fair bit of experimenting the eucalyptus around here, trying a few different types of leaves and barks and trying different methods from long simmering to fermentation. I always have ended up with yellows. This time I just tried an unimpressive, scraggly eucalyptus shrub from our yard, and I was amazed to see the shocking orange it produced.

natural dyeing workshop

I'm sitting in a little cafe in Taos, mind reeling after an incredible, intensive, two-day natural dyeing workshop. The class was taught in the La Lana Wools dye studio by Luisa Gelenter and Maryalice Garrigan. These women are amazing alchemists, and I feel so damn lucky to have had these days soaking up their knowledge and spirit.

The Dye Studio

Simmering pot of snakeweed dye

Spoons and sample cards, hung on the wall

Indigo greens and blues

This workshop focused on local and native dye plants -- chamisa, snakeweed, mullein, indian paintbrush, kota, marigold, peach leaves, walnut -- although we did sneak in a little indigo for overdyeing. For me, as a transplant to the Southwest, learning about these dye plants is part of what gives me a sense of place.

And it was tremendously eye-opening for me to get a sense of what a production dye studio looks like and how resource intensive it really is! So, although this class re-ignited my passion for diving into natural dyeing again, it also made me feel like I should just keep it on a personal hobby level. It's interesting for me to watch how those feelings are shifting.

I can't say enough good things about how much I learned and how much joy I took out of this workshop. But do you know what the best thing was about it? Having two days with such a fantastic and inspiring group of women, from different ages and places, but all drawn together by a love of fiber and color.

easter eggs

I arrived at my friend's house on Sunday night bearing gifts of beets and marigolds and dessicated bugs. We were egg dyeing, of course! And I wanted to experiment with natural dyes.


It took a very long soak indeed for the eggs to take up the color, but they came out well in the end. The light purple is from cochineal, the deep blues are from red cabbage, the light yellow is from marigold flowers, and the splotchy tan in the back is from beets.


They're so beautiful and painterly in this clear morning light.

fruition

Spring is in its full glory in Phoenix. The jasmine has burst into perfumed bloom. The grapefruit flowers hang heavy and sweet on the trees. Green things are going into their growth spurts.


I've had my own burst of productivity and fruition, at least when it comes to my natural dyeing. Over the past few months, my hands have been kept busy gathering dyeplants, measuring out mordants, stirring pots, straining, dyeing, skeining, and labeling.


The dyes that I've used include juniper, creosote bush, sumac leaves, oak galls, pomegranate, pecan and walnut hulls, coffee, cochineal, and madder. All but the latter three are plants that I've grown or locally gathered.


These plant-dyed organic wool yarns are soon to be released as Ever Green Yarns, sold through the marvelous One Planet Yarn and Fiber shop.


I've been tending and nurturing these yarns for months, and I am so happy and proud (and, dare I say, relieved?) to finally share them with the world!

Prickly Pear Dye Experiments

Prickly pear fruits yield the most gorgeous, luscious, magenta juice that you can imagine. Naturally, when I'd juiced a batch for jam-making, I wondered about dyeing with them!

The pigment in prickly pear is betalain, which is the same pigment that gives beets and bougainvillea their lovely, deep, purplish reds. Betalain turns out to be a rather unstable dye-source, as its sensitive to both light and heat.

But the juice color was too deep and seductive to pass up! And anyways, I thought prickly pears might still be a good candidate for dyeing, since you don't have to heat them to get juice.

I soaked alum-mordanted alpaca/wool yarn in straight juice overnight, and I got this enchantingly deep magenta yarn. The picture doesn't begin to capture the richness and saturation of the color. Truly one of the most beautiful colors I've ever gotten with my natural dyeing.

And then (sigh) I went and tested it for lightfastness. I started with samples of three naturally-dyed yarns -- (1) a light lilac from local cochineal on alum-mordanted yarn, (2) a medium magenta from prickly pear on unmordanted yarn, and (3) a dark magenta from prickly pear on alum-mordanted yarn -- and hung them, half-enclosed in cardboard, on a south-facing fence. There they got a three-weeks' dose of good, strong Arizona sun.


And here's the big reveal - such drama and disappointment! The prickly pear dye disappeared from the unmordanted yarn and faded to a dull peachy tone on the alum-mordanted yarn. Interestingly, the cochineal faded more than expected, too, although it's to be noted that I used strange little cochineal scraped from neighbors' cacti rather than cochineal that was specifically prepared for dyeing.

After this debacle, I found some terrific old books on Native American dyeing at a used bookstore. The prickly pear recipes in those books had the yarn fermenting in prickly pear juice for several days; perhaps it is worth trying this experiment again with that method. I think, though, that from now on I will enjoy my betalain in the bougainvillea....

Black Walnut Dumpling (bag)

When I was back in Connecticut late last month, I went on a walk in the park with my dad. We passed under some black walnut trees whose branches were heavy with walnuts, and I had my dad whack a bunch of them out of the trees with his cane!

It was a sweet and lighthearted moment, and I was happy to come home with those gorgeous, fragrant nuts. (Kitty took an interest in them, too)

I gave the hulls a good boil and a two-day soak, and then I tossed in a huge hank of wool yarn from my local market in Vermont. The yarn started out with one strand of white wool and one strand of gray. It came out as a warm, marled brown.

Now, about this time, I'd seen the dumpling bag in the autumn issue of Interweave, and I couldn't wait to cast on. I used size 10 needles since that's what I had. I made two other main adjustments: First, to make it more of a purse size, I added an extra increase row so that it was 80 stitches around. Second, instead of the handle in the pattern, I cast on provisionally, then picked up stitches on one side, knit two long strand of I-cord, twisted them, and kitchener stitched them to the picked up stitches on the other side.


Before felting, the bag was 12.5" wide, 9"deep from the V, and with a 20" handle. After felting, it was 11.75" wide, 8" deep, and with a 21" handle. Don't ask me how it ended up with those dimensions -- it should have felted down much more, and the handle should have gotten shorter, not longer! All I can guess is that I'd slightly felted the yarn during the dyeing. Something was definitely off, because my initial swatch -- which I'd done with a small swatch that was barely dipped into the dye -- felted much denser than the bag itself.


You can see for yourself how texture and color varied during the course of this project: (1) gray marled yarn, (2) brown dyed yarn, (3) big swatch unfelted, (4) small swatch felted, and (5) finished bag (note: those two swatches didn't start out at the same size, but you can still compare the texture).


All the same, I'm going to get a lot of use out of this bag. I've been using it as my purse for the last few days, with a kilt pin as a closure.

coffee as dye

Mountain Man recently handed me a pair of white linen trousers. He told me he never wears them, and he asked me to dye them. Yay! I love a dyeing challenge.

The reason it was a bit of a challenge is that plant fibers are much less receptive to natural dyes than animal fibers. They usually require a labor-intensive series of mordants, and even then they often don't come out with the same pleasing colors.

I decided to search for a substantive dye, which is one that requires no mordant. I thought about pecan hulls and tree barks, but I settled on the nearest one at hand: coffee. (A big thanks goes out to Mama Java's, our local independent coffe house, for collecting some grounds for me.)

Before I got to the main event, I wanted to do a little experimentation. I set up two dye vats: (1) one for the stovetop, with a conventional 1-hour simmer of dyestuff and 1-hour simmer of fibers, and (2) one for solar dyeing, with a 2-day soak of the coffee grounds and a 2-day soak of the fibers. I made mini-skeins of wool, handspun alpaca, and cotton yarns for each vat, and I added a silk skein to the conventional vat as well. The results:

Left to right: tussah silk, conventional wool, solar wool, conventional alpaca, solar alpaca, conventional cotton, solar cotton.
Overall, I was pleased with how the solar dyeing compared to the stovetop dyeing. It produced slightly lighter colors, but it was free, carbon-free heat.

I love the caramel color that came out on the silk and wool. You'll notice, though, that the cotton just came out looking dirty. Had me a bit worried for those trousers, but I tried them out anyways, solar-style (that was the lesson I took from the experimentation). And, reasonable success!
I did two rounds of solar dyeing on them, and they came out a light khaki color, a little warmer than it looks in the photo above. I had to agitate them in the dye pot (basically, plunging my hands in every couple of hours and giving them a good scrub) pretty often in order to get the color even. Both my hands and the fabric seem coarser after all that, but it was worth it. Now Mountain Man has a pair of pants he can spill coffee on with impunity!

dyeing experiments

After my foray into kool-aid dyeing, I've come back to the natural dyeing full force. It's felt like an exciting challenge to learn all about what I can dye with from this new landscape. So in the past few weeks, I've tossed dozens of plants into the dyepot -- our kitchen gives the distinct impression that Macbeth's witches are our houseguests! Here's what it looked like as I was 'loading' the dyepot, with pomegranate rinds drying in the sun:


I have a big enamel pot with a few inches of water in it. For these dyeing experiments, I just pack the large pot with mason jars, each with a plant sample (anywhere from a few teaspoons for something like turmeric to a few handfuls for a plant I'm unfamiliar with). I bring it to a boil, simmer it for about an hour, and then leave it for a few hours to cool. Then I'll add mini-skeins of wool -- alum mordanted or unmordanted -- and simmer those for an hourish.

These were the dyes from my kitchen (turmeric, carrot tops, chamomile) and neighborhood (all the rest). Unless otherwise noted, they're alum mordanted. Starting at the bottom and moving clockwise, we have: cochineal (yes!! I found some growing on a neighbor's cactus), pecan hulls, pomegranate rinds, unmordanted eucalyptus, eucalyptus, rosemary, chamomile, unmordanted carrot tops, carrot tops, turmeric exhaust with a pomegranate mordant, and unmordanted turmeric.

The turmeric is fantastic but not very light-fast, although the pomegranate rinds are supposed to help it (I'm interested in them more as a source of tannin mordant than a dyestuff). The carrot tops were a real surprise, and the fresh cochineal is divine. All in all, I was exceedingly pleased with the results.

The next task was to explore the desert plants. Mountain Man and I spent a day rock climbing in the nearby McDowell Mountains, and I came back with a backpack stuffed with plants: jojoba leaves, desert mistletoe, creosote bush, willow, ferns, and many others that I couldn't identify. Here they are, layed out on the counter in the evening:

The results were rather disappointing, with muted, washed-out colors. Some of the brightest yellows came from the most odiferous plants - creosote bush and turpentine bush (named because they have these smells). But I am curious about the pale reddish color that I got from the mistletoe, which is on the bottom, so I may try working with that to see if I can find another way to extract it.

And that's it for now! I've got another set of samples simmering away as I write this, but it's time to focus on the knitting again for a while ...

back to the dye pot

I've been dabbling with dyeing again, inspired by a book that I'll talk about below. But first, let's cut straight to the dyeing.

I decided to try kool-aid dyeing because I was working on two 'commissions' (a hat for a friend and socks for my sister) in colors that I can't reliably get (yet!) from my natural dyes. For the hat, I wanted to dye an alpaca/wool blend a soft ferny green. I managed to get it by adding a bit of grape to lemon-lime. This photo is washed out with too much Arizona sun, but you can get a sense of the final skein along with my shade samples: lemon-lime (acid green), lemon-lime with a bit of grape(olive), and lemon-lime with too much grape (icky brown).

For the socks, I needed a deep, shocking red. I got the color from black cherry with a little cherry added in the end. It took twice as many packets as I'd expected to get the color saturation that I wanted, but it was worth it! It's so yummy looking I can hardly stand it. The samples in front, by the way, are cherry, black cherry, and grape.

Now, I'm the first to acknowledge that Kool-Aid is the antithesis of my green ethics and aesthetics. But, man, was it easy to dye with. I just heated up some water in my dye pot, soaked the yarn while the water heated, took the yarn out to stir in the kool-aid, and plunked it back in until it soaked up the dye. There was no complicated mordanting, no careful measuring, no uneasiness about using toxic chemicals in the kitchen, no hours of simmering at certain temperatures. I'll definitely play with it again.

That said, it doesn't feed my soul like dyeing with plants. I'm starting to tinker with new plants. Here are three yellows from plants that I can 'wildcraft' in my neighborhood of central Phoenix: from the top, Mexican Marigold, Rosemary, and Eucalyptus. The colors are flatter than the rich, golden yellows that I used to get from the goldenrod, marigold, and rudbeckia in my Vermont garden. But it's a start!

And now for the book. I got guidance on kool-aid and the idea of dyeing with eucalyptus from a new dyeing book: The Yarn Lover's Guide to Hand Dyeing, by Linda La Belle. I LOVE this book. Most of the dye books that I have just give basic dyeing recipes, perhaps with a photo or two of the raw material, dyepot, or dyed yarn. This book gives photos of every step for all kinds of complicated dyeing techniques: kettle-dyeing, handpainting, space-dyeing for self-striping, cold-pad dyeing, microwave dyeing, etc.

She shows you what the final yarn looks like as well as how it looks knitted up into a garment -- super useful, since the final knitted garment is often *very* hard to envision from the skein. The patterns that she's written for the handdyed yarns are simple enough to show off the dyed yarn, but with just enough of a twist to make them special. To top it off, she also has interviews with several of my most-admired handdyers, including Darlene Hayes of Nature's Palette and Becky Weed and Katey Plymesser at Thirteen Mile Farm, who focus on natural dyes. I wish she'd gone into a bit more depth on the toxicity of different dyes, and I also wish she'd added more about using natural dye extracts in addition to dyeing from raw materials. But these are minor quibbles that speak to my own idiosyncratic interests. Overall the book is a pleasure to read and a treasure trove of technical information. I'm definitely inspired to expand my dyeing techniques - expect to start seeing hand-painting in the near future!

Taos Magic

There are times when life hands you gifts, gifts so beautiful that you wonder what you've done to deserve them and you vow to be a better person for the rest of your life. This is what I felt like last weekend. We were thinking about driving to see a friend's fantastic film - Dalai Lama Renaissance - in the Taos Mountain Film Festival. All resentment about the 9 hour drive evaporated when our friend said these magic words: "By the way, there's a wool festival in the park right next to the film festival."

So we were off to spend the weekend looking at films wool! Here are few images:

good husband carrying off some of my purchases

local emergency service men clustered around a spinner

awe-inspiring plant-dyed yarns from Earth-Arts

The plant-dyed yarns were the surprise treasure of the festival. Although I went absolutely ga ga over all the handspun alpaca that was there, I went all out for the naturally dyed wools. I came home with these beauties:

The weekend wore out my driving stamina and my shopping stamina -- expect a yarn moratorium for a while now. But I'm totally invigorated for learning about the west (Taos is gorgeous!) and for checking out all the fiber arts that are going on here.