It's Almost Spring

Spring has been teasing us in Minnesota with short tastes of what is to come. When spring does arrive it often jumps quickly to summer weather. These single days when the temperature hits 70 degrees puts me in the mood to do some natural dyeing.

I had been gifted some rock tripe lichen from my friend Janis and started the fermentation process in March. Mixing chopped lichen with water and ammonia in equal parts started the process. Then it took a lot of jar shaking and watching the mixture move from brown to orange brown to various shades of purple. The oxygen in the jar is incorporated into the dye solution with shaking the jar and bubbles are a good sign. Karen Casselman suggests keeping the process going for 4 months to add fastness to the dye. Last week my 4 months were up and it was nice enough to use the hotplate on the deck and the actual dyeing began.

It is time to catch up on what I have not been posting and I will continue with some of the summer dyeing form the past year. Our son and daughter in law have a gorgeous garden that fills their entire yard front and back, all the work of Heather. She is kind enough to include many dye plants among the vegetables, berries and herbs and is always happy to let me strip the stalks bare for my projects. I have a few dye plants in my little 2 by 4 flower area but that seems to be more of a salad bar for the rabbits and deer. I did get a nice dye pot or two of chamomile that made lovely yellows from both the flowers and the whole plant. The whole plant makes a tinge of green in the yellow.

I like to do solar dye jars with flowers on my south facing deck in the summer. The sun does the work and the jars can stay and warm up multiple times with no harm, even when I am on vacation.

Last fall was the first time I dyed with saffron to get pink!! Heather had grown some nice plants and Trader Joe's has fall bouquets of just saffron so I was able to collect quite a lot of petals. You need to first soak the petals to pull the yellow out of the solution. I did that twice. Next a third soak in a jar of cold water and soda ash to change the ph basic. The water should turn red or pink after its soaks. Add vinegar to move to acidic 6 ph and add a piece of linen cloth. This was fascinating to see but it takes 100-200 % petals to weight of fabric.. The color fastness is also not good. I can see big change from fall to spring and the fabric was out of the light.

I think this will not be a dye I need to repeat but I am glad I did it once!