After two days of work...one to dye and one to de-wax, wash, and press, the chuppah cover is ready for the next step. What a tense process! Taking all of my test pieces into account, I just sat for a while and let a dye formula work its way to the surface of my mind. I decided to mix .5% walnut (using the weight of the fabric as the base), .25% tannin, and .025% logwood gray. This was based on my perception that walnut (at the light values I was looking for) was red, tannin was yellow and log gray was...purplish. Combining those should give me a neutral that was in the middle, I hoped. When I got out my big kettle and made the dyebath for the full-sized piece, intuition told me that the logwood gray was too much, and I only added half of the solution that I had mixed. Before just leaping in, I skimmed a half gallon and dyed a scrap of linen to see if I was in the ballpark. It took quite a while for the dyes to bite, and I was constantly trying to judge whether the value was right, but finally the scrap looked pretty good, so I made the leap, fired up the big pot and put the fabric I have been working on for a month into the color. I had used up the linen test pieces that I made from the same length of cloth as the main piece. The sample I was using as a guide came from a piece of white linen that has been sitting in my refrigerator for quite a while, mordanted with the same alum acetate, but from a wholly different time and company. There was no guarantee that the two would come out the same, but at least I knew I was close. I stood over the kettle and stirred constantly for an hour and a half, when finally the color bit and appeared to match the wet sample scrap. I let the pot get hotter than perhaps was best, so at the end, at about 180 degrees F, the surface of the pot was covered with clumps of wax that were starting to melt off.
I rinsed off the crumbly bits, stretched out the mangled looking cloth, let it dry and took the first picture yesterday. It looked pink. The fronds that were screened with tannin came through much better than I expected; in fact they were more vivid than the waxed parts, which now looked dirty and unappetizing. I was afraid too much wax had come out in the hot dye-pot and that all the main design elements would now be brown. The whole thing looked sad, but I could only proceed.
Today I boiled the cloth and dunked it in a solution of sodium silicate, or water glass. This is messy and horrible...absolutely my least favorite part. When the wax was gone I was relieved to see that the white base color it had been protecting from the dye mostly came through, with the broken marks that wax always imparts. The main color looks darker and browner today, but even after pressing it is not entirely dry, so it will probably be lighter (and pinker) tomorrow.
Now the spirals and forward fronds look white and the tannin-screened fronds look yellow. I am surprised about that but I did make the tannin pretty strong because the last time I tried using it, it disappeared. Not the problem this time. The whole thing looks dull and insipid at this stage, which I did expect. It is tentatively successful, although I'm not sure I like the color, and I'm still not sure the value is right. However, the thing is now what it is and good enough to take forward. The various marks do show, there is a layered effect and I still like the design. My mind is now leaping ahead into thread weights and colors, but first I will try to attach it to a harem cloth backing with Jude HIll's glue stitch. That will take at least a couple of days I think. Onward.