I’m back…. I didn’t go anywhere on my break, just had some family relaxing time, which was well needed.  So I’ve just finished getting the orders out that had piled up in my absence

And now I’m dying… but it’s not bad – it’s exciting!  On my stove I have bubbling away something special…… bubble bubble… toil and trouble!  Hahaha, no……. I may be a Witch, but it’s fabric bubbling away!  I’d take a pic but the camera batteries are dead.

At the moment I’m testing unmordanted fabric with annatto seed, and so far it’s a satisfying shade of orange… and I have a mordanted fabric with alkanet – which I was dissapointed at first, because it seemed to be doing nothing, but it’s now a reasonably exciting light purple, and I’m planning to redye it again tomorrow to try and build the colour up.

I have some indigo that I’m planning to have a go with, but that’s a bit more tricky, it doesn’t work like a normal dye… normally you mix harsh chemicals (sodium hydroxide) in to make it work…(something to do with air….) but you can also do it with the “fermentation method” where you use yeast or something else natural – which is the way I’m planning to do it.

I’ve been planning for ages to do some fabric dying with natural dyes.  That’s the main reason I bought the organic cotton… many many months ago.  But I’d been put off by the fact that I wanted to find something that would be as natural as possible, colourfast, and didn’t want to use a mordant….. and something appealing in colour (not brown).   But over the last few months I’ve been doing a fair bit of research into natural dying, and realised it was not so scary, and that the alum used as a mordant is actually used in pickling food…. so it can’t be too bad…. surely…

A few months ago I tried unmordanted fabric with henna and turmeric.  I went to a lot of effort painting a mehendi design on the fabric, only to have a less than satisfying result….boiling fabric in a henna mix only lead to a sort of medium strength coffee coloured fabric, which was also less than satisfying… although it isn’t a bad shade… I think it’s nicer than the natural colour, and it’s something a bit interesting at least – but not the rich reddish brown I was hoping for..  Turmeric on the other hand – WOW!  Brilliant yellow.  Better than expected.  I’ve read that it’s not very colourfast though – in that it will fade.. and on something like a pad that is going to be washed – obviously that’s something important.  The plus though is that if it does fade, redying it is simple – a tablespoon of turmeric in a saucepan, pop your pad in, boil it for a bit and you have your brilliant yellow pad back…

And then I got the alkanet to try, but needed the alum.  Can you believe that I had some, I bought it about 9 years ago, thinking “I’ll find a use for that” and never did, and only a few months ago, when  was cleaning up my sewing room/junk, did I go through and throw out some of my collected herbs and things, including that – figuring if I hadn’t used it in 9 years and had no idea what it was for – I’d surely not need it.  Stupid me!  Finally found a place online to buy it (My thrown out stuff had only cost me $1 too… *sniff*), and it finally arrived the other day – YAY

So the next step is to test the wash-fastness of the different dyes.  Since I’m a terrible housewife and don’t do laundry often enough to test it out this century myself … I’ve got some volunteers to wash some samples with their loads of laundry for me, so I’ll get them to wash them 20 times, and that should tell me how well the colours hold up.

I’m hoping that I can have some colours done with just fabric and the spice/plant dye – nothing else… to be as natural as possible… and for some to be the next step up – using natural dyes with an alum mordant…. which on organic cotton is still better for the environment and your body than commercially chemical treated fabrics.

I think I need some madder (to make red)…. and maybe a green…