Raven and Sparrow

Into indigo

Here are three of my old cotton tablecloths that I have waxed and painted. The one on the left is the cutch/iron dip dye project, the middle one has been painted with weld, and the blue purple one is an indigo-cochineal combo. I'm planning to put them all into indigo, hoping for black, chartreuse, and purple respectively.

When the indigo pot looks blue, it isn't ready to dye anything. Indigo is only soluable in water in the absence of oxygen. All the oxygen must be removed from the pot before the fiber is added. While it is immersed in the liquid it picks up indigo, which solidifies and adheres to the fabric when it comes out into the air.

I remove oxygen chemically, by adding thiourea dioxide. The traditional method is to compost it out. You have to feed your indigo pot over several weeks, kind of like sourdough starter, but it takes much more time and attention than I have to offer so I take the short route. Most indigo is composted out of its host plants, so it has a distinctive odor. Fortunately, it doesn't linger on the fabric. When the oxygen is gone the pot turns yellowy green. When placed in the indigo, the fabric also looks green, only turning blue once you pull it out. The metamorphosis happens right before your eyes just like magic.

Another element of indigo dyeing that must be controlled is the pH. Indigo must be highly alkaline to work properly.

This is my third attempt to get these pictures in, so I am going to quit now before I lose them again. I will show the results tomorrow. I HATE DIAL-UP.

Losing wax

It seems like forever since I last posted. Sorry to be so long away, but I was sent down to Seattle for three days of training by Home Depot and it played havoc with my schedule in many ways. I have now worked for HD for one year. I am proud of having stuck it out, but in another way it seems like a year lost.

On my way home I stopped in at earthues, my old stomping ground in Ballard. It was great to catch up  with my friends there, but the most arresting part of my visit was the row of silk yarn and fabric on the table. I wish I had had my camera with me so I could share it with you properly.  There was a blue (indigoferra tinctoria guatamalensis), a red (madder), a yellow (homegrown weld from British Columbia), a purple (indigo and cochineal), and a green (indigo and weld). They are combinations I have seen many times, but these particular samples were so intense and luminous that they haunt my thoughts. When I close my eyes I see that spectrum of fiber pulsating with color. I remember now why I work with natural dyes and feel a renewed urgency about getting on with my own dyeing.

I decided to try dip dyeing my brown maple leaf tablecloth to get deeper color and it worked well, except for the wax. I got very nice color even though I only took the temperature up to 140 degrees F, but even so the wax crumbled off in clumps. All of the scum you see in the pot is wax. However, I could feel the wax still on the pattern, so I just held my nose and went ahead with the iron. Cutch and logwood grey make a nice brown, but to get chocolate, you need to do a post bath of iron.

Here is how it looked in the iron bath. Iron really darkens and saddens most colors. When the cloth dried it was dark brown. The waxed pattern too was darker and greyer but I don't know if only the wax was affected by the iron, or the cloth under it. We shall see.

Painting cutch with one foot in another world

After mordanting my japanese maple design I thought I might try to go really dark with the color, even to black. To achieve black, I usually start with chocolate brown, and the basis of my brown is cutch. Cutch is the heartwood of the acacia catechu tree found in India. It isn't my favorite color, because using alum as a mordant takes it very red, and I'm not crazy about red browns. However, adding logwood grey knocks the red out, so I started with a combination of cutch and log grey. This is one of the beauties of using natural dye extracts; you can combine them like paints. I mixed a very strong concentration, but when I applied it to the (admittedly) wet cloth it faded out weakly. I have applied another layer and made it darker, but it could be a problem with painting on the cloth. Cutch achieves its deepest shades when held in a hot dyebath for over two hours, and even then it strikes during the cool down phase. Painting just doesn't allow those conditions, but with wax on the cloth I can't put it into a hot pot. I might try holding it in a warm bath just cool enough to preserve the wax if I can't get it dark enough by painting.

In the meanwhile, I am much more interested in the brown I'm getting than I thought I would be. It reminds me of tobacco. That image is reinforced by the aroma. Cutch has the same woody, leafy sweet smell as a pouch of fine pipe tobacco, only more exotic. As soon as I open the can visions of cinnamon, silk and foreign bazaars come into my mind. Spice indeed. I love this part of using natural dyes. They provide instant sensory transportation into other times and places, so part of me is strolling in India as I paint.