Well, the plan for the Madder Baselines is about done - the rest of the planning will have to be done as soon as we know how many samples there will be to handle, and then go for a last check through the long list of steps - before following them through to, hopefully, a nicely colourful end.

Meanwhile I have a second template to turn into a plan and protocol: the template for a mordanting experiment. Common Horsetail is said to contain quite a bit of alum, so it is in theory a replacement for mineral alum which may not have been available everywhere. However, it's not really clear if the horsetail is really suitable for this, mostly because there's no recipe that tells us about amounts necessary, or if there was any other preparation done before using it. Or at least I have not been able to find any...

So the idea was to try out if the plant will work as a mordant, and if yes, how much of it is needed. Because even if it's available, if you need ten times the amount of wool weight to have enough alum, well... that would mean 10 kg of the dried plant for a single kilo of wool, and if you've ever woven fabric, you know that a kilo is a puny amount.

I can think of three different methods of using the plant straight away: as it is (just dried, then soaked, and maybe boiled a bit previously to better get out the contents), fermented, or (which would also reduce the bulk of it) burnt to ashes (which should still contain the metal, though maybe in a different form). 

Obviously, the burning and the using as is do not need extra prep time, but the fermenting does. I'm happy to report that the 100 g of plant that I put into 7 litres of rain water are doing what they are supposed to be doing: Making bubbles and working on changing their smell.

It's not an unpleasant smell (at least not yet), but it is definitely much different from the smell it had at the start (like dried horsetail, but thank you, Captain Obvious). I'm very, very curious already to find out how (or if!) all this will work!

These are madder roots from our garden, freshly dug out. They'll make part of the second part of our experiment on madder dyeing - using different batches of madder with the same water, and see how different they will come out.

Madder is said to get better the longer it matures - first in the ground, then once harvested, resting time of a few years is also said to make it better. But I figure that too-fresh madder may be better than no madder at all...

It will be dried now and then ground up, and I hope for a yield of at least 30 g afterwards (though in a pinch, 10 g would be enough). It would definitely be nice to have some more samples to test. So - do you happen to have a bit of dried madder to spare? Would you be willing to donate 10 to 30 g of it for our experiment?

Dyeing recipes are, well, let's say they often are interesting. And usually they will raise a lot of questions. And then some more.

First of all, just like old recipes for cooking, medieval and early modern dyeing recipes go easy on the measurements. Which makes a lot of sense because measuring stuff easily and precisely, like it's possible with modern scales, was not a thing back then. Also, just like with cooking food, variabilities can be quite large, which means that you'd have to gauge by experience if this is too much, too little, or just right.

And then there's the question of what is meant by a specific term. Such as... bran. That, it seems, can either be bran (as in wheat bran) just added to the dyebath, or it's fermented bran - if you let the stuff sit in a bit of water, it starts to ferment, turning slightly acidic.

Some of the recipes that we plan to look at during the Textile Forum also mention that as an ingredient - it also goes by the moniker "dyer's strong water" in some cases.

So guess what happened here in the kitchen?

It's fermented bran - I got a taste of it when I was in Romania, where it's called "borș", and it does have a quite pleasant taste. If you're curious now, you can read more about it in Wikipedia, and if you google for recipes, you will get some instructions about it. I tried with added (dry, actual Romanian) bread in the mix first, as many of the instructions tell you to, but I left it for a bit too long and the bread went mouldy. So in the second attempt, I used only bran and water - it took a bit longer for it to turn sour, but it was a success that time.

So now I'm looking forward to trying this in the dyeing! 

Just in case you were curious on how much wool one can fit into a 250 ml lab glass beaker, it's about 12 g of dry goods in this example, consisting of a small skein of yarn and a piece of fabric about 17 cm square:

tIt fits, but there's not much floating possibility... so it might be a good idea to put in a little less wool. Probably a smaller piece of fabric, and maybe a little more yarn to stay at sort-of-sensible amounts (but yarn will be a bit less, um, stiff?).

It's always fascinating to watch things unfold and questions come up when planning an experiment. There's usually a lot of aspects, and one has to decide on how to handle each one, while knowing that in many cases there's no really good solution that will cover all the possibilities..

While I'm doing necessary office work (the books have to be kept once in a while, for tax stuff to be sorted out in time), part of my brain is still nibbling on the madder-water-tests. Especially that part which likes to add more and more things to an experiment... because, well, variables and such. And the good old "but but but there's more to find out, can we not?" thing. Aaah.

Current ponderings are related to the dyestuff, not the water. I had decided, in the start, that we'd use one batch of madder, preferably of at least decent quality, and if possible (very much preferred) of very good quality, to do the test runs. Now one of the colleagues asked "which madder are you planning to use", and I started thinking... It's clear that we will test different waters with the same madder - but should we also test different madder harvests/sources with the same water? There's definitely enough local tap water to do that, and I might be able to get two or three other waters in sufficient quantity to do a comparison of two to four different kinds of madder (well, technically one water would do, but maybe different madder qualities react differently to different waters)... so that would be an option. An option that tickles me, to be honest.

And that's not even dipping a toe, or fingertip, into the whole huge, HUGE topic of assists such as bran, fermented bran, beer, and other plant materials that were sometimes added to the madder bath. I've even read about the roots being roasted beforehand. So, so many things that one could try, and try to figure out what they do. In some cases it's pretty clear, at least part of it - adding sour material such as beer or fermented bran will adjust the pH, which is almost always a factor when dyeing. But what pH is the best one for the madder? And how did the dyers of old know how to dose it? (Well, if you just add beer or bran, you can taste it. That would definitely work.) But is the pH the only thing that will be doing stuff? Or would the fermented bran also do some microorganism magic and act on the madder roots while it all soaks before dyeing? Would the (probably dead) yeasts in the beer add something? Or the alcohol have an effect?

So many questions. It would probably be enough for a doctoral thesis (a pH-D-Thesis, hah!) to figure out all, or at least most, of the influences on the madder. 

Here's hoping that nobody will get mad when we tackle this at the Forum... 

I am back, and I had a wonderful time at the Forum - with all the typical hustle and bustle and utter, complete and wonderful madness that this week brings.

We had threads and thread-making as the focus topic, which meant that there were lots and lots of things for me to load into the car and ferry to Mayen - from tools to heckle flax or hemp to all kinds of spindles and spinning tools, plus some other tools in case something needed cutting, sawing, drilling or sanding. (There was some drilling done, so these did come in handy.) There were nettles, and there was wool of all kinds, and some cotton, and as always, it was not enough time during the week to do all the things that I had hoped to do.

That does not mean, though, that there was only little done - on the contrary. We managed to really do a lot of things, with work going on from right after breakfast to long after dinner... spinning, splicing, and some other things as well.

Micky Schoelzke spent a lot of her time in the laboratory room, working on a large series of dye variations to explore fake purple - the imitation of true snail purple dye through the combination of blue (from woad) and red (from madder). Some of the tests were overdyeing, and some of the tests were dyeing fibre to later blend together in different combinations of shades and different ratios.

The blending was a lot of fun, with lots of people working together to weigh the fibres, then blend them, and then spin little samples for comparison. It also looks like blending fibres is much easier to do for achieving a purple-ish colour than the overdying method. The blend will result in a slightly speckled look of the finished product (as can also be seen on a few extant samples where this method was used), while the overdyeing gets a more even result that can come closer to the Real Thing. However, hitting the right colour when overdyeing is much harder than blending fibres together, especially since you can do a little sample with the blending and then adjust ratios rather easily, while overdyeing is much more fickle. Yes, you can do a test dye, but the time, effort, and resources required for that are much higher than to do a test blend or two.

There's still a lot to explore on this topic, and I'm looking forward to more on it. The comparative ease of the fibre blending opposed to the overdyeing is, however, an argument for dyeing something in the wool that I can readily accept - because I'd usually vote that dyeing something in the yarn, or in the fabric, makes more sense. Less felting (which will occur even if you are very careful with your fibre), less loss of dyed fibre, and the yarn needs to be wet-finished anyways so dyeing will take care of that as well... plus yarns are easier to handle than fibre is. But if you want to spin blends of colour, well, you have no choice but to dye in the fibre.

The other big experimental action of this year's Forum was making gilt membrane threads... and I will tell you a bit more about that tomorrow.

A while ago I wrote about dyeing silk and different outcomes, depending on whether it had been degummed or not. My degumming try that I referenced back in that post ended up being not completely successful, as some of the gum had still stayed in. 

I finally got around to doing it again, with a fresh sample, and this time I made sure to steep it to death, or something very close - it stayed in the hot soapy bath for a full hour, and I used de-ionised water to avoid any hindrance by our rather hard tap water. 

And here's the result:

As you can see, there's four samples now. The one on the bottom is the silk dyed in the gum, the one on top is untwisted degummed embroidery silk dyed together with the gummy silk. On the small roll in the middle, the bottom one is the outcome of my last trial, partly degummed, and on top is the completely degummed silk. 

It's become very light in colour, even lighter than the silk that was degummed before dyeing. I had expected something like that - either a bit lighter, or somewhere around the colour of the embroidery silk. 

There is definitely more shine now, but it is also much more delicate; I've had several snaggy bits even though it's a twisted silk. 

So my current conclusions are:

If you want to work with silk that has next to no twist at all, leaving it gummy or partly gummy might be a good idea to up the stability. The sericin also seems to take natural dyes much better, so if you want to have really deep, vivid colours... leaving it gummy or partly gummy is, again, your friend. In case you want it to be utterly shiny, though, degumming is the way to go.

Though I had the impression that the thin strands of gummy silk, with about 20 den, are also looking quite shiny. More exploration might be necessary...