Kitchen Dyeing
We are most very grateful to Dee Duke and Rowena
Edlin-White for their permission to reproduce this article from
their booklet "Everything in the Kitchen Sink ~ Dyeing with Kitchen
Waste" from the Woolgatherings for Dyers & Spinsters range by.
The series of excellent (and beautifully illustrated) booklets are
available in our shop)
Equipment
Much smaller quantities are likely to be used when dyeing with
waste, so your equipment can be smaller also. Ideally I would still
recommend the purchase of a stainless steel bucket or bowl with a
lid if possible, but an old enamel bucket or saucepan will do -
whatever you happen to have around. The thing to remember is: make
sure you keep your dyeing pots separate from your cooking pots! A
plastic colander is useful for straining and the odd wooden spoon
or stick for stirring. I have found a small slimmers' scale to
weigh small quantities in grams very useful. There is no reason why
you can't do your dyeing on the kitchen stove so long as you keep
the kitchen well ventilated. Do remember to take extra care to
clean up well afterwards and avoid mixing dyeing and cooking!
General dyeing notes; Vegetable fibres and fruits usually need
to be brought to the boil and simmered for about an hour to extract
the colour. They must then be strained otherwise the debris adheres
to the yarn and has to be picked out afterwards. When the yarn is
added, bring the dye-pot back to the boil and simmer until the
colour takes effect. Another method for small quantities is to use
a one pound jam-jar. Pack with dyestuff, hot water and small skeins
of yarn and leave on the kitchen windowsill in the sun for as long
as it takes - et voila, solar dyeing! Most natural dyes are fast
and will not "bleed" in the wash but many will fade gradually in
direct sunlight. However, they still remain beautiful.
Mordants
These mysterious substances are mineral salts which are used to
treat the yarn either before or after dyeing to alter the colour
and fix the dye. You will usually obtain some shade without a
mordant but it may be quite delicate.
The four mordants we use in this book are fairly harmless
substances easily obtainable from a large chemist (iron and alum)
or are to be found in your kitchen cupboard (salt and vinegar).
Others, such as chrome, blue vitriol and tin are used by some dyers
but they are highly toxic and should not be used in the kitchen.
Neither are they very kind to fibres.
Alum (Aluminium sulphate): At one time you
could buy this as a home remedy at any chemist and it's very
popular as a mordant. It's helpful to prepare a number of small
skeins of wool in advance. For six skeins of about 12 yards each,
mix a small amount of alum - about the size of a small pea - with
half a teaspoon of cream of tartar in warm water. Put in a pan with
the wool and just enough water to cover the skeins but allow them
to move freely. Bring to the boil then simmer for 45 minutes.
Turn them out into the sink and allow them to cool. They may be
kept damp in a plastic bag for up to four days or they may be
allowed to dry and stored for a longer period. If they're allowed
to dry, however, it can be quite difficult to re-wet them before
they go into the dye-bath. To overcome this, put a small amount
(about a teaspoonful) of washing-up liquid into the pre-rinsing
water before putting the skeins into the dye-bath.
Iron (Ferrous sulphate); This is used after
dyeing to "sadden" the colour - it will transform yellows into
greens and browns, pinks into mauves. As much as will cover the tip
of a teaspoon is quite enough. Mix with a little warm water and add
to the dye-bath which will probably turn brown. Add the yarn gently
so as not to aerate the water too much and the transformation
should only take a minute or two, so watch it! This is sometimes a
good way of redeeming a disappointing alum skein.
Salt: Half a cup of salt to one gallon of
water, but this may be scaled down as required. Bring to the boil
and simmer the yarn in the solution for one hour.
Vinegar: 2 cups of vinegar to one gallon of
water. Bring to the boil and simmer the yarn in the solution for
one hour. Distilled (white) vinegar in the quantity mentioned
enhances acid fruit dyes. Some dyestuffs will already have vinegar
in them (see Red Cabbage, Pickled Walnuts and Beetroot) and will
not require a mordant.
Salt and vinegar may be used directly in the dye-bath but this
precludes the use of other mordants at the same time, whereas if
all your skeins (apart from iron) are mordanted beforehand, they
can be put in together.
Preparing and Finishing. Spun wool must be well washed (scoured)
in soap flakes in hand-hot water and rinsed in water of a similar
temperature. Wash and rinse twice and then add to the dye-bath. If
washed or mordanted previously, re-wet thoroughly for an even dye.
If using commercial yarn, wash and rinse once in soapflakes.
It's good to leave the yarn in the dye-bath to cool and so
absorb as much colour as possible. Rinse in water of the same
temperature as that which the yarn has just left - this is
important as it avoids "shocking" the wool and maybe causing it to
felt together. After washing and rinsing, dry naturally in the
shade if possible, though over the bath or in an airing cupboard
will do.
Make sure the skeins are dry within 48 hours or the wool will
start to go "mouldy". There are many other native dye plants to be
used, also wood-shavings and dried dyestuffs available from
suppliers which give a spectacular range of colour. Hopefully this
article will whet your appetite to try them, but dyes from your
kitchen are not only easily to hand - they're free! The colours
indicated in this book are only the ones we obtained; colours will
differ according to the time of year, where the vegetable or fruit
were grown, the hardness of your water, even the pans you use. Do
keep records of each experiment you do, even if it is a repeat,
because it will never come out quite the sane. A snip of yarn with
the details and date make the whole exercise much more
interesting.
As a bonus here is one of
Rowena Edlin-White's personal talks where she reminisced on the
birth and growth of Woolgatherings and The Spinster's Almanack and
talked of Kitchen dyes.
This is the story of a joke which prompted a publishing
enterprise which, though I say it myself, has been a modest success
over the years and has received warm recognition from such diverse
areas as environmental and self-sufficiency groups, historical
re-enactment groups, and the textile media like Spin Off and The
Black Sheep Newsletter in America. It was the obvious solution to
my twin passions (at the time) for hand spinning and natural dyeing
and publishing.
When I learnt to spin nearly thirty years ago in North Wales,
there were no books to tell you what to do but a legendary
spinner/weaver Morfydd Roberts lived just over the hill and she
taught me and my colleague Judy Snape to spin. Judy later founded
the Natural Dye Company with her sister Sarah Bumett. I can
remember our first pathetic attempts to colour our hand spun wool
with natural dyes - we stuffed a bucket full of dandelions, boiled
it up, stuck the wool in and achieved - precisely nothing! Morfydd
wasn't a dyer so we had to search out the information we needed. We
only knew of one book Vegetable Dyes first published in
1916 by another legend, Ethel Mairet of Ditchling who pioneered the
revival of hand spinning and dyeing in Britain in the 1920s. I
managed to get hold of a secondhand copy with great effort and at
enormous expense (£6.50 in the days when I earned £16 a week as an
actor - so that gives you some idea of how keen I was) and from
Mairet's book I learnt the basics.
Very gradually we began to find other material from America -
but mostly we learnt the business by trial and error and a lot of
fun it was too. I came back to Nottingham in 1981, at the height of
the craft revival, joined a local spinning Guild and found out
more, but there was still very little available in print for
English spinners and dyers. In 1983 I started a Guild Newsletter -
The Spinster's Almanack. By a fluke of fate it found its
way to America, it got an enthusiastic review in Spin Off,
and before we knew what was happening people were writing to us
asking for subscriptions. Within two years it had been plucked from
the ranks of local newsletters and become an international
publication and 20 years on we're still publishing it! (Every year
my colleague Dee Duke and I say, 'Shall we stop now?' and then we
get a new wave of readers and feel we can't.)
I took my publishing inspiration from the many small press
magazines which appeared in the 1960s and 70s, in wonderful
alternative bookshops like Mushroom in Nottingham and News from
Nowhere in Liverpool, in particular one little mag. called Country
Bizarre which was produced by Andy Pittaway and Bernard Schofield.
It was very much a back-to-the-land type of mag for city dwellers.
I liked their style and when I began, I wrote to them and they were
very encouraging and friendly. They later went mainstream and
upmarket and produced a number of classic books on country crafts
and country traditions, including spinning and dyeing.
Why bother natural dyeing?
Spinning your own yarns is a very satisfying and enjoyable thing
to do, but why bother cooking up nettles and barks and whatnot to
dye those yarns when all sorts of synthetic and chemical dyes are
available? Natural dyeing is attractive to me because it's
precisely that - it's natural. If I'm going to spend hours spinning
beautiful natural woollen or silk yarns, I only want to dye those
yarns with natural, gentle products which will preserve their
integrity and do no harm to me or the environment. Natural dyes are
subtle, often free, harmless and beautiful. They are also
unpredictable - it is difficult to obtain exactly the same colour
twice for a number of reasons. It depends where and when you
collect your dyestuffs which can be as basic as nettles, docks,
weld, dandelions, elderberries etc.. Different soil types,
different locations, weather conditions, time of year etc.. will
all affect the colour. Personally I love that unpredictability,
never knowing quite what I'll get. For this reason it's advisable
to dye enough yarn in one batch for the job you want it for because
you may not be able to match the colour if you run short. Natural
dyes are also what we call 'fugitive' - they are unstable - some
more so than others - and they will fade in direct sunlight.
However, they never fade away completely and will only become more
subtle with time.
Other dyes which are more reliable or 'fast' tend to be foreign
dyestuffs like indigo which is a whole dyeing technique on its own,
but we do have our own native 'indigo' - woad. Things like
Sanderswood, brazil wood, madder, cutch, and so on can be purchased
as powder from suppliers. Being highly concentrated, they keep well
and you don't need a great deal for a dye bath, so although they
are comparatively expensive, they're worth the investment; and they
are still 'natural' in that they are derived from vegetable
material, and will produce stronger, more vibrant colours than most
of our native dye plants. Dee and I began writing about dyes we'd
tried in the Spinster's Almanack and people wrote back and shared
their own experiences, and gradually we collected a large amount of
information about the dyer's art.
But what about the Kitchen Sink This began as a joke. I'd
published a very slim booklet about native dye-plants called A
Handful of Nottingham Dye Plants - very rough on a school
photocopier. It didn't sell very well, largely, I think, because
people assumed the plants were only available in Nottingham, so it
was rejigged a few years ago as A Calendar of Common Dye Plants and
it now sells very well -just goes to show the importance of finding
the right title! But Kitchen Sink was a gift, as well as a joke. I
was teaching an evening class in spinning and dyeing at Clarendon
College and I'd demonstrated a few simple dyes in class and
encouraged my students to try some for themselves. At the end of
term they brought their samples to show me - and one woman had
really got the bug and done lots of experiments. However, she said
she hadn't had time to go trawling the hedgerows, and she didn't
like to waste anything, so she's just used anything and everything
she had lying around in the kitchen - vegetable parings, old
tea-bags, the liquor from jars of pickles, mouldy fruit -just to
see what she would get and we all had a good laugh at some of the
things she'd tried. But her results were stunning; she'd tried
things I'd never have thought about like red cabbage - beautiful
delicate pinks and blues, and pea and bean pods - they were truly
subtle . . . in fact they were negligible, but she'd tried
everything. I was so impressed that I thought they deserved being
written up and recorded. She said she'd used "everything but the
kitchen sink" in her dye-pot and so the book became "Everything
in the Kitchen Sink: dyeing -with kitchen waste." Again the
first editions were done on a pre-war manual typewriter illustrated
with what are now our signature 1930s graphics -because we couldn't
afford photos - produced on the school photocopier and stapled by
hand. The rest, as they say, is history, it just sold and sold. It
caught people's imagination and also a desire that was growing then
for natural products, for recycling and reusing waste materials and
also the spirit of experimentation. It is also ideal for people who
live in flats in the city and don't have a garden with a convenient
nettle-patch. It also suggests the possibilities of dyeing in the
winter when fresh vegetable matter is unobtainable. Kitchen Sink of
all our dye books is upfront and honest about our results - the
ones which didn't work very well as well as the ones which
surprised and delighted us - and it encourages the reader to try
for themselves and see what they get.
Woolgatherings
In 1992 Dee Duke and I looked at the craft book trade and we saw
how much things had changed in 10 - 12 years we'd been spinning and
dyeing. Very different from the late 1970s and early 80s when I was
virtually scouring historical archives to find out about dyes - now
there was a massive market in craft books all illustrated with
glossy pictures and starting at £12.99 - today it's probably £25 -
and giving you no more information in real terms than Everything in
the Kitchen Sink. We saw a gap in the market and decided to produce
a series of basic books for spinners and dyers at the rate of two a
year, alternating spinning and dyeing, at a low price - £2 - and
we've only recently put that up - no fancy photos but black and
white line drawings where required - and our by-now famous vintage
graphics. We produced 10 in this series and then began to branch
out a little with rug-making, weaving etc.. I run it as a small
mail-order business from my spare bedroom, I use a local printer,
and Dee test-drives all the dyes and techniques -she's far more
methodical than I am! Environmental organisations like
Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales sell
our titles in their mail-order catalogue and other eco-shops in
Britain and America stock them. But after all these years
Everything in the Kitchen Sink - which we revamped as No. 6 in the
series is still our biggest seller - so it must have something!
What shall we dye?
I think I've enthused quite enough about the attractions of
natural dyeing. What might you wish to dye? If you are a
hand-spinner this is self-evident - you will be producing yarns
from natural fibres, many of which are suitable for natural dyeing:
wool is the best, but silk and cashmere and angora take natural
dyes very well too. Cotton is a difficult fibre for natural dyeing
- it's not impossible but it doesn't take the common dye-plants
very well. Better with the foreign dyestuffs, and, of course
Indigo. The more hairy fibres such as alpaca, llama and so on
aren't so good either. If you're not a spinner, that doesn't
matter, you can use any commercially-produced knitting yarn so long
as it is pure wool or pure silk or pure cashmere - a yarn which is
a mixture will produce a mottled or patchy effect which may not be
what you want. Some tapestry embroiderers enjoy dyeing their own
colours and white tapestry wools may be dyed to imitate Mediaeval
or Tudor colours, for example. Kate Koppana, writing in SA No. 80
has explored these possibilities to reproduce some designs seen at
Hardwick Hall. We have a Woolgathering, The Mediaeval Dye
Pot dedicated to traditional dyes like madder, weld, woad,
saffron etc.. and historical re-enactment societies find that book
very useful. A Calendar of Common Dye Plants gives an indication by
season of wild plants available like tansy, nettle, feverfew,
goldenrod, horsetails, ragwort, yarrow etc.., and in the autumn
things like blackberries, elderberries and sloes - which of course
you can freeze for use later on. If you want to grow your own. Dyer
in the Garden will tell you how and what to try like marigolds,
camomile, dyer's broom, delphiniums - the more conventional border
plants as well as the ones that often sneak in when you don't want
them like the nettles and elder! A Dyer's Palette is a slightly
more advanced book from which you can choose the colour you require
and then see which natural dyes will produce it for you.
The Dyes
But back to the kitchen sink - So what are some of the things
you might have knocking around in your kitchen that might be used
for dyeing?
1. The dregs - used tea leaves or tea-bags and
coffee grounds. Both strong dyes. Keep them in a plastic bag in the
freezer till you have enough or they go mouldy. You can even use
Coca-Cola - you know those big budget bottles from the supermarket
- they always go flat?
2. Onion skins - if you've ever dyed Easter eggs
you'll know how strong these are -you don't need many for a
dye-bath and you'll always get a sure-fire result. Save in a
brown-paper bag and they'll keep for years. If you pickle onions,
you can save the skins, boil them up and use them before you throw
them out - shallots.
3. Pickle juice - from jars of Beetroot or Red
Cabbage or Pickled Walnuts, just keep in the jar until use.
4. Spinach - if you have spinach in the garden that has 'bolted'
or gone just beyond its best for delicate and unusual
colours.
5. Orange and lemon peel - not strong dyes but
pleasant and subtle.
6. Nut shells - particularly pecan shells and
walnuts - need soaking for days rather than hours but they're very
rewarding.
7. Soft fruit. Often gets wasted if there is a
glut or you've had some blackberries, damsons, raspberries,
loganberries - anything hanging around too long - started to fizz a
bit, go mouldy - don't throw them away - dye with them! And you can
always put the debris on the compost heap afterwards.
8. Any veggies unfit for human consumption like
carrots, artichokes, peppers - give them a try, we've had colours
from all of them.
9. Flower heads - remains of flowers like
chrysanthemums, peonies, marigolds, dahlias - past their best but
still can be used for a small dye-bath Really, the possibilities
are endless.
Mordanting
You'll have noticed that each of the dyes I've shown you has
several skeins of different shades? This is the right time to
mention mordants. Many vegetable-stuffs will give you a colour with
nothing added, but dyers use a variety of mineral substances in
order to make the colour stick better to the yarn. These also alter
and intensify the colours given. Especially for dyeing in the
kitchen, we have restricted our recipes to mordants that are
virtually harmless if used properly:
1. Two very common things you'll have in the kitchen anyway - salt
and vinegar. Salt helps dyes to 'stick' - remember how you have to
add salt to a Dylon dye? And vinegar enhances fruit dyes. The
liquor from the pickles I mentioned before like red cabbage
produces strong dyes because of course vinegar is used in the
pickling, so it's already mordanted.
2. Alum or aluminium sulphate - should be able to buy from a good
chemist. The yarn is treated with alum before dyeing and you will
usually get a yellow bias to your dye.
3. Iron or ferrous sulphate. Used in tiny amounts after dyeing to
'sadden' the colour. On a good yellow like that obtained from onion
skins it should turn the colour green - as I shall be demonstrating
that this afternoon.
Equipment
Interestingly, the pans you use for dyeing can also change the
colour and we added a section on these to later editions of the
book. Aluminium and cast iron vessels will of course have a similar
effect to mordanting with alum or iron. The only really substance
is stainless-steel. These used to be horrifically expensive but
places like Wilkos now do a range of stainless steel at a very
reasonable price and you only need one good-sized pan. Otherwise an
enamel or galvanised bucket will do very well. Needless to say
don't use it for anything else but dyeing, same with wooden spoons
and tongs and whatever else you use - keep them separate from food.
Apart from that, an old plastic colander for straining, a pair of
rubber gloves to stop your hand going orange and a waterproof apron
are all you need. Turn the extractor on if you have one and open
the window or door whilst dyeing as it can be a bit
smelly!