I first started using natural dying about two years ago when a friend showed me what she had learned on a natural dying course in France. She was convinced I would love it and she was right! I've been swatching so many different plants and flowers since, testing their colour at different times of year and from different geographical locations. I'm on the hunt for colours that I like for Fine Tilth, so I've been exploring a lot with sage, eucalyptus, dock and others that give shades of browns and greens. I plan to explore mixing colours using more traditional dye plants too, but I quite enjoy the treasure hunt of foraging for colour from weeds, herbs and other abundant and unexpected sources. In this journal post I will show you the process I used to dye a couple of meters of fine linen with dock flowers. Excitingly this fabric will become my first fully naturally dyed shirt for Fine Tilth!
Weighing the un-dyed dry fabric to calculate how much dyestuff to use.
Scouring the fabric in soda crystals which removes all the gums and pectins and other dirt. Followed by mordanting the fabric using alum acetate 6% which I left over night for extra steeping. As I'm using dock flowers which are very high in oxalic acid I didn't think it was necessary to do a tannin mordant prior to the alum.. but I'm not entirely sure if that was the right decision, it's very hard to know, there are so many variables!
Making a wheat bran bath to remove any remaining loose alum from the fabric after mordanting. Yes... I literally used wheat bran flakes from a major cereal brand beginning with K. They are 87% wheat bran so I figured the extra ingredients of sugar and a bit of barely malt can't hurt too much *i hope*. The kitchen smelled yummy at this stage.
The jar of dye, made by heating and stirring the dock flowers for a couple of hours then straining. For this experiment I used the same weight dyestuff to fabric, usually 50% is recommended but as these are a cheap and easy crop I thought I'd go big.
Heating the dye bath with linen now immersed, I was aiming to reach 93C and then keep it around there. I would say it was mostly around 89C, I hope that wasn't too low. The results are lighter than my swatching has been, but it's such a vastly different fabric quantity it's hard to know.. Also back when I was swatching I was boiling them, but I've since learned that boiling is generally not advised. I wonder if boiling them was giving a deeper colour, even if that was just a temporary richness that would fade quickly once settled.. so many questions.
Gently rinsing in warm water without soap. This is always when it looks it's best, when the fabric is still wet! I've learned to withhold my excitement for a hot minute until it's a 100% dry.. see below.
I will now store it in a dark place for 2 weeks to let it 'set' before washing with gentle soap. Then it's ready for shirting! Or it might be over-dyed again if I decide it's too pale. For over-dying I would not need to re-mordant the fabric, so the process would be much quicker, just straight into the dye bath!
.... slow fashion.