Curly Dock

So, I've had curly dock (Rumex crispus) growing in my garden.  Been meaning to pull it for a while, but then decided to check and see if it's something people have used to dye with. And the answer is yes, apparently they have.

Curly dock seems to be native to Eurasia and, according to illinoiswildflowers.info, was first observed in the US in the 18th century. Apparently, the young leaves can be eaten and are reportedly rich in vits C and A. (I make note of this for my friends who like to know such things. They like to know that for when the zombies attack or the world ends.)

I'm going to try to do two baths - one with the leaves, the other with the roots. If I'm ambitious enough, I may even try a dye bath using the inflorescence. 

After having a look through the books, Wild Color said equal weight dye material and yarn for dock, regardless of if leaf or root. I'm going to stick with my normal 4 oz of wool that'll be mordanted with alum and CoT.

The leaves I gathered weighted about 6 oz.   While I'm mordanting the wool, I'll go rinse off the roots and set them aside.  Natural Color by Ira G. mentioned that the root color will still be good if the root dries, so that will be less of a concern. 

Off to mordant some wool.

So far:

6oz of curly dock leaves were put into a crock pot with about 1 gal of filtered water. Set to "high".

Iris Root

Apparently, I'm very forgetful as of late.

I did this on June 9th, added in on 6/27:

Iris Root dye bath.

4 oz fisherman's wool
approx 12 oz iris germanica root (several days out of ground, spend overnight in a bucket of water, and then hacked up)

Wool was alumed and cot'ed. (2T, and 1.5tsp., respectively)

Roots were dug up, put in wheel barrow sort of contraption and left there until I could deal with them. Put then in a bucket, ran water over them, left them to sit for a few hours (had to have dinner and sit). Went out and removed leaves, soft spots, and chopped them up to about dice sized pieces (ish). Put in crock put, poured a little water over, swished around, drained dirty water. Put in more clean water, put crock pot on high and went inside.

Came back out every hour for about three hours to check, finally turned it off and went back inside, leaving the crock pot and dye bath juice to sit.

Prior to the dye bath being made: Soaked wool, added it to mordant bath, heated it for about two hours (was doing yard work that day), let it sit to cool. After... a day, I think, I rinsed the wool, and took it out to the dye bath.

Added it, heated it. It did actually reach a boiling. Turned it off and let it sit.

It's been that way since Tuesday. Instead of the grey-blue I was told to expect, I've gotten a yellow. Not quite what I was expecting, but maybe if I had dried the roots, it would have turned out differently. Plan on trying that again, as I have more irises that I need to dig up.

Iris Flowers experiment

Boiled Iris flowers to extract a dye bath. Transfered that to my crock pot. (I don't know how many I had. I think it was about 20 German Iris flowers).  Mordanted approx. 4 oz of homespun wool with alum (2T) and cream of tartar (1.5 tsp.).

Put the wool into the dye bath and heated it up.  This turned the liquid from purply to brown.  Heated it for about 3 hours, and let it sit over night. And over night again. The color of the wool was a sickly yellow brown. Not very attractive.

I had a thought of adding more iris flowers (about another 20) and heating the flowers and wool together. I did that and let it sit for about 1.5 hours and then let it sit. (It would have been longer but there was this thing called work that I had to go to.)  It sat over night. Removed from the dye bath and I let it drain for about a day. (Yes, truth be told, I removed it to drain, and then went to bed and had an early shift the next day so I forgot about it.)

The yarn had a very cool purple splotchy pattern going on, but that pretty much rinsed out.  However, I think the fresh flowers added a nice greenish to the wool.

I did finally find something that said to mordant with tin crystals. Not quite up to dealing with that just yet.

If I have any flowers left, I might just try mordanting and then adding the wool to the bath with the flowers and heat it then. We'll see what tomorrow brings.