Wk 9: Crunch Time!

Final Dye Baths

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This week was a big crunch to finish up my remaining dye projects that were in progress. The first project to tackle was the wool scraps that I would dye with my foraged material from Week 4. I had frozen and stored most of these items, but I went out to get some of them fresh as well (particularly the bracken fern and horsetails). I had multiple dye baths stewing on my stove at a time, it felt really nice to be so motivated and to get all of them finished so quickly. I used a mix of the all-in-one and the hot dyeing method for the wool; I will say that the all-in-one resulted in lots of plant material getting caught in the final pieces that took some patience to pick out.

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These photos really do no justice to the final colors of these wool pieces. While the horsetail and alder cone dyes didn’t have much of an impact, the marigold and bracken fern created some incredible results that I’m pretty excited about. I think this part of my project, especially, taught me the important lesson of what works and what doesn’t work, and also that testing dyes out in advance is a great idea. I would love to expand on wool dyeing in the future, maybe focusing on spinning my dyed wool or felting with it as well.

Bracken Fern Dye – Curtain Disappointment

This curtain was a huge dyeing failure and disappointment. I had wanted to dye it using the remainder of my bracken fern dye because of the beautiful green color it had translated into the wool, but it wasn’t until the curtain was simmering away in the dye bath that I realized it was most definitely made from a synthetic fiber. This is an issue when dyeing because synthetic fibers, like polyester, are made from plastic materials that are unable to soak up dyes. Hence, my curtain did not dye. It was unfortunate that the tag on this curtain had been cut off or this issue could’ve been avoided, but I also probably should’ve known from feeling the fiber itself. Oh well. Lesson learned!

Marigold Dye – Bandana

Caleb Poppe was very kind in gifting me some dried marigold flowers to use for natural dyeing! I used some of the flowers in my shoe dyeing project, but I wanted to do something special with the rest of the flowers, not just dye a scrap of wool. So, I searched around for some ideas and settled on dyeing a white cotton bandana. I first mordanted the bandana with alum and then folded it up in a spiral pattern so that the piece would be tie-dyed instead of just one solid color. Then, I simmered the bundle in the marigold dye for an hour before letting it sit overnight.

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It worked! I was so excited when I unfolded this finished piece, I think it looks so cool and I am so happy with the spiral pattern and the finished color. I finished the dyeing process by rinsing and washing the bandana before letting it hang to dry. This dye was such a success that I even saved some of the excess for later use. I am hoping to maybe try solar dyeing with the rest of it or another small tie-dyeing project.

Thank you Caleb for gifting me the dried marigolds!

Final Shoe Update

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This is what the shoes looked like after another week of bundle dyeing. I was a lot happier with the color variety, but still not 100% content with the final product. However, I chose to be finished with them at least for now so I could have something to share for this project. I still think the results are super exciting and I can’t wait to show them off around town!

I think once my presentation for class is over, I might do a final round of bundle dyeing with them to try and get a bit more color. I have found that the keys to bundle dyeing are time and patience. I think that the longer the dyer lets the bundle sit, the better the colors will be, but I was just overly excited and impatient so I chose to unfold them after a week both times around. Now that I understand this, I want to strive to be more patient so I can hopefully achieve even more colors in this project. I also think, though, that this project is really cool because I have the ability to come back to it whenever I want and try re-dyeing with whatever materials I want. Even if the current colors start to fade away over the summer, I can just simply re-dye with a new variety of materials, which is something I am pretty excited about.