So from this
in seven hours I had this
The plants are Japanese Indigo - Persicaria tinctoria. Back in early spring a fellow member of the On-Line Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers gave me a little envelope of seeds, and directions for how to grow them. I raised the seedlings in my greenhouse until mid June, when I planted out 50 plants in my vegetable garden. It was such a poor summer, cold and wet with very little sunshine, and the poor little plants didn't seem to grow much for a long time. But eventually they branched out and reached about 50cm height.
For the last few days I have been worried that the cold early mornings would damage the plants before the day I had set aside for the dyeing, but this morning the plants were in good shape and I was ready to harvest them.
I stripped the leaves from the outdoor plants (two plants are growing on in the greenhouse in the hope that they will produce seed for next year) - it took about an hour and I harvested 1275g of leaves. Two buckets full!
I added cold water and slowly heated the pots aiming for 60 degrees. Unfortunately the big dyepot overheated and I had to let it cool off. After 2 hours the dye was ready to strain.
Next the chemistry bit - first adding washing soda to raise the pH to 9 or 10 (I checked it with litmus papers), then whisking vigorously (my neighbours must sometimes wonder what on earth I am doing in my garden!!) to oxidise it, producing a blue foam on the surface.
I used some paper to remove the scummy foam - and now have two sheets of marbleblue paper to cover my dyeing notebook.
Anyway, the next thing, having whisked all that oxygen in, is to add spectralite to remove the oxygen (I dont need to understand why it works, just to know that it does!!) After a couple of minutes the vats were ready to start dyeing.
The yarns I had prepared were: my own handspun Shetland wool, some white and some dyed yellow with silver birch leaves; my own handspun white crossbred (english) wool; commercially spun local blue-faced leicester wool from Strathearn Fleece and Fibre; 2/9 wool yarn (a bit finer than sock yarn); 2/18 wool yarn (very fine laceweight); wool boucle yarn; mohair loop yarn and a cotton/linen cable yarn in natural beige.
I wound 2 x 100g cakes of the 2/9 wool and 2x100g cakes of the mohair loop yarn, because I wanted to see if I could get a variegated yarn due to the dye only penetrating part of the cakes. The rest of the yarn I made into skeins with at least three string ties on each skein to avoid tangling.
All the yarn was put to soak in basins of cold water the night before. I also soaked some washed wensleydale fleece (also Strathearn Fleece and Fibre - from one of Linda's own sheep, a ewe called Matilda).
Yarns from the small vat - the greyish looking skein on the right of the picture is the cotton/linen yarn. I didn't much like the colour so I didn't dye the other two skeins that I had prepared of this yarn. The third batch of yarns that went in to this vat were very crowded and they have dyed unevenly - the mohair loop yarn has blue and pale lilac variations which are really pretty. They are in the second row from the back in the picture.
I rinsed all the yarns in cold water and they are drying as I write. In total today I have dyed 1400g of fibre. Jenny Dean, in her book Wild Colour, says that you need 3 times as much dyestuff as fibre for this dye - perhaps if I had limited myself to 400g of yarn I could have got deeper shades, but I am very pleased with the colours I have got. I can't wait to see what the colour changes in the yarn cakes are like - I think I will be knitting several blue shawls this winter!
