Tag Archives: fiber arts

Queen Madder

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Madder is a root, latin name Rubia tinctorum. This is a dye that has been known for many years. The plant has little yellow flowers and has to grow in the fields for three years before the roots can be harvested and used.

madder

Depending upon the mordant, it yields red, a pinky brown, or brown. However, because it is a botanical and dependent upon growing conditions, yield and color can vary.

I mordanted silk scarves with alum and cream of tartar.

The chopped roots were put into a stocking and soaked in a dye bath.

 

madder

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although the dye bath itself was a lovely red, my scarf came out more of a pale peach.

madder scarf

 

 

Dyeing with Annatto seeds

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I work in a library and, well I guess most people don’t know this, but libraries run regular programs. Since I am a crafty person and especially interested in textiles and textile crafts, I do a lot of programs that involve quilting and dyeing.

Using the same directions I used for onion skins, we dyed annatto seeds. Annatto seeds are red seeds that are used in Latino cooking, most particularly Puerto Rican cooking. Thus, they are totally non-toxic.

annato seeds

 

 

annatto dyed cotton

 

 

 

Here is a cotton towel dyed with annatto seeds. It is a lovely sunflower yellow.

 

 

 

 

annatto dyed yarn

 

One of my students preferred to dye lambswool, worsted weight. The yarn had more orange to it. A really beautiful color.

Yellow dyes

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Yellow should be one of the easier colors to obtain, right? After all, aren’t a lot of flowers yellow?

Well, yes. I can think of two plants right off the bat that grow in the US: showy goldenrod and tickseed sunflower, that produce yellow dyes. That fabric must be premordanted with alum – and yes, alum was used in Colonial times for a variety of purposes. The tickseed produces a strong orange but the goldenrod gives a bright sunny yellow.

The flowers must be collected. For tickseed, put in hot water but do not simmer or boil, for 1 – 2 hours. Strain out the flowers and add the cloth or fiber. Soak for an hour or so. The process for goldenrod is similar, except that the water should be simmering and the flower simmered in the water for 1 – 2 hours. Once the plant material is removed, the fiber can be added and simmered in the dye bath again, until the desired color is attained.

In Colonial times, however, the source for yellow was something called ‘fustic’. Never heard of fustic? Well, it was so important that at one time the English enacted a law stating that the logs from which fustic is obtained could not be shipped into any Colony except by British ships. Fustic is derived from the wood of a tropical American tree (Chlorophora tinctoria), a member of the mulberry family. Sometimes the wood was called dyer’s mulberry.

It arrived in the form of logs which were chipped into small fragments. Usually, after being tied in a bag, they were soaked in water for two or three days before going into the dye bath.

Fustic was usually mordanted with alum and cream of tartar (yes, the same stuff one uses in a scratch cake). It was not a bright yellow, and some Colonial sources describe it as faintly orange (fustic was also used for drab colors) but it stood up well to washing and light. Fustic was also used regularly in compound colors: with indigo to make green, with red to make red oranges and so on.

Not bad for a material most of us have never heard of.

Writing and the Writing Life

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I’ve always wanted to write and wrote my first story at ten. (It was fantasy and every paragraph started with suddenly.)  Since then, I have set aside part of every day to write, and it has not been easy. Up to this point, I’ve had some limited success.

Now I discover that when you do publish, suddenly you have many other tasks beside the fun one of actually writing the story. I refer, of course, to editing and copy editing. The first edits suggested by my editor were kind of fun and I looked upon them as a free creative writing course. And boy were they helpful. I’d gone through the book about six times and there were still places where I didn’t explain something.

Copy edits are different. You look at every word, every comma, every character. Not fun or glamorous at all.

The other task writers do is talk. I’ve already had my first speaking ‘engagement’. I never mind doing this, though. I can always talk and my first time talking about my book was to a group of librarians. Since I started working in libraries at 16, talking to librarians was not a problem. I joke that I can talk to librarians with my mouth taped shut.

Anyway, learning to be a writer, as opposed to ‘writing’ is definitely a job.