Archive for category: General Dye Information

I was contacted a little while ago by Carol Leonard, an old friend, fellow dyer & spindle-spinning expert, who wondered if I could shed some light on an interesting result from a dahlia dyebath.

Carol explained that a student on one of her spinning courses had tried a dye experiment, using dahlias that had been in the house for a few days in a vase and were past their best. She used no mordant and, she thought, an aluminium pan and the pan and the skeins (wool and mohair) had been properly cleaned. She simmered the flower heads, then put the yarns in with them.  When she removed the skeins there was the faintest pink colour on them, most of which disappeared when the water was drained from them.  So she put the yarns back into the pan with the flower heads, put the pan on one side and then forgot about it for a couple of weeks.  During that time, mould grew on the surface, and the dyebath probably fermented.  When she next looked at the skeins, they had become a bright pink.

As I have recently harvested some of my dyer’s broom and gathered some weld from the roadside, my thoughts have been turning to sources of yellow dye.

This weld was growing on some waste ground at the roadside. When I harvest weld from the wild, I always make sure to cut each stem above the last two or three side shoots, so they can develop and produce flowers and seeds for the next crop. I also shake some seeds from the harvested stems on to the ground below the plants.

                                                                                                                                                                           Some of the dyer’s broom growing in my garden. This plant is easy to harvest, as I treat harvesting for the dyepot as a way of pruning the bushes. In good summers,  it’s possible to harvest dyer’s broom twice – once in late June and again in September.

 Yellow is the most common colour available from plants and is usually the one with the poorest light fastness. I think it is probably also a colour dyers tend to require less frequently, unless they are using yellow to create greens in combination with indigo. When dyeing yarns or fabrics for items of clothing, or for furnishing fabrics, yellow tends to be required mainly in relatively small quantities to provide contrast with other colours. Creative artists may use yellow more frequently in tapestries or wall hangings and in these situations the fastness of the source of yellow dye is particularly crucial. Of the numerous sources of yellow available, weld (Reseda luteola)  is one of the most permanent, although technically it has a low fastness rating because of its tendency to “fade”. (See Gill Dalby’s “Fast or Fugitive” for details of light and wash fastness ratings of dyes). However, the term “fade” refers technically to any change in colour, not only to a reduction in depth of colour, and weld actually “fades” to a darker, rather than a lighter, hue as time passes. This means that, although weld may lose some of its brilliance over the years, it will not usually become significantly paler. So when selecting a source of yellow, weld is my first choice, with dyer’s broom (Genista tinctoria) a close second. Dyer’s broom contains many of the same dye pigments as weld and produces very similar yellows, although they may not always have the brilliance of yellows from weld. Weld and dyer’s broom are traditional European dyes and are also easy to grow. Weld is a biennial so it needs to be re-sown, but dyer’s broom is a perennial shrub, which is also a very attractive garden plant.  Both dyes are best used with an alum mordant, although they will produce reasonably strong shades on unmordanted wool if followed by an alkaline modifier, such as washing soda or wood-ash-water. When used fresh, weld and dyer’s broom sometimes give stronger, more acidic yellow colours than those obtainable from the dried dyestuffs. If you gather weld or dyer’s broom and dry it for storage, it is best stored in closed brown paper sacks, well away from the light.  If stored in this way, the dried dyestuffs should give good, strong colours in the dyebath.

Rhubarb root (Rheum spp.) is also a very useful source of yellows, particularly as rhubarb root can be used without a mordant. Both culinary rhubarb and ornamental rhubarb can be used for dyeing. I find it best to chop up the root before it is dried as, once dried, the root can be very difficuilt to cut up because it is so fibrous. Another method is to reduce the root to useful-sized chunks, (50gms for example) and then freeze the chunks separately in clearly-labelled plastic bags. Freezing breaks down the fibres, so the root is much easier to chop when thawed out. Rhubarb is not poisonous but it is a common ingredient in laxatives, so it is advisable not to mistake it for a foodstuff when you remove it from the freezer. I usually label it not only on the outside of the plastic bag, but also on a piece of stiff card, which I put inside the bag. Rhubarb root is a strong dye and as little as 25% – 30% will usually give a good, clear yellow. If you use too high a percentage, you may miss the yellow and end up with a mustard colour, so it is better to start with a little and then re-dye if necessary to build up the colour. However, if you do end up with mustard, using an acidic modifier (clear vinegar, for example) will usually shift the colour to yellow.

Of the yellow dyes not native to Europe, fustic (Chlorophora tinctoria) is, in my opinion, one of the best. Some dyers may be lucky enough to be able to obtain Quercitron, the inner bark of the black oak tree, from the USA. This dye source was highly prized in the past for the beauty and clarity of its colour and for its fastness properties, but is rarely available in the UK. A little while ago I was kindly sent some from the USA and I was delighted with the glorious colours it gave, so if you find quercitron on offer anywhere, I would highly recommend it.

Many other garden plants provide sources of yellow – indeed the majority of plants will yield some sort of yellow or beige. The Spring leaves of most fruit trees give yellows and even Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens balsamina), which grows so rampantly here along riverbanks and at roadsides, will give very pretty shades of buttery yellow. Among the most useful readily-obtainable sources of yellow are birch leaves (Betula spp.), goldenrod (Solidago spp.), dyer’s chamomile (Anthemis tinctoria), coreopsis (Coreopsis spp.), and tansy (Tanacetum vulgare). And I mustn’t forget buddleia, which featured in an earlier post.

Dyer’s chamomile growing  in my garden. I rarely use the flowers for the dyepot as they look so pretty on the plants. There are several varieties of Anthemis tinctoria available from garden centres and all are lovely garden plants. Although a relatively short-lived perennial, dyer’s chamomile seeds itself readily, so it’s not usually necessary to buy new plants.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Goldenrod in my garden. Some gardeners dislike goldenrod, as it spreads so rapidly, but I value it, not only as a useful source of dye colour, but also as an attractive garden plant, especially when grown next to a deep purple buddleia. 

Other dyers will no doubt have their own favourite yellow-producing plants and of course there are many plants that give shades of mustard, rather than a clear yellow. I have concentrated here on my own favourite readily-available or easily-grown sources of yellow and I apologise for any serious omissions.

This alum-mordanted wool skein was dyed with goldenrod, using alkaline and iron modifers to create the colour variations.

                                                 Sage flowering in my garden, with a welcome bee just visible on the far left.

                                             More sage and another bee.

Every now and then I come across a reference to a dye source from the past that I find surprising. My surprise is usually because the dye in question is often not one in common use today. One such dye source is sage, Salvia officinalis, which was used in mediaeval times. Sage is one of the dyes mentioned in the Plictho de larte de tentori, a collection of dyeing recipes published in Venice in 1548 and compiled by Gioanventura Rosetti, the Master of the Arsenal in Venice.  Although I suspect few natural dyers today would regard culinary sage as a common dye source of choice, the leaves give subtle shades of mustard yellow/ brown and an iron modifier gives attractive tones of deep mossy green. When I cut back my sage bushes, which can grow rampantly if not checked, I dry some of the prunings for culinary purposes and use the rest in the dyepot. (See the post “Anglo-Saxon Dyes part 2 ” for examples of colours from sage leaves.)

A friend phoned me last week to ask whether I had heard of privet, Ligustrum vulgare, being used commercially in the past in Wiltshire as a dark green dye. She had read about this in a novel but I don’t know whether the reference was to privet leaves or berries, so I wonder whether anyone else has more information about this? Privet leaves give a yellow shade, which would become a mossy shade of green if modified with iron, and perhaps they were used instead of a more traditional source of dye because  privet happened to be readily available locally in the wild at the time and was therefore a cheap alternative? As far as privet berries are concerned, according to a reference in Dominique Cardon’s “Natural Dyes”, the juice from the berries was used in the past to dye the red, violet and blue colours on playing cards. There is an illustration in her book of an 18th century cardboard playing card from Nimes, on which privet berry juice has been used as a dye. Red was achieved using Glauber’s Salts (sodium sulphate) and potassium sulphate, urine was added for violet, and lime and potassium sulphate were used for blue.

Another unexpected source of dye colour is the reported use of damsons, Prunus sp., as a dye for a variety of purposes, including dyeing hats for the Luton straw hat industry and dyeing wool for the textile industry in Westmoreland. Apparently, damson trees were planted around Market Drayton in Shropshire, and also in Worcestershire, to meet the demand for dye, and some damson bushes found today in hedgerows or in old orchards are the remains of trees grown for dyeing and not for damsons for eating. In my experience, with the exception of buckthorn berries, berries generally make poor dyes, especially on animal fibres, and the colours from berries tend to fade rapidly. So I am surprised that damsons, which are so good to eat, should have been specifically grown to be used for dyeing, when more reliable, traditional dye plants could have been grown. However, it may be that the colours given by damsons could not be achieved from dyes that could be grown or were readily available at the time. It would also appear that, in the past,  berries containing anthocyanins were frequently used by painters and dyers in those areas where they were abundant. For example: the blue in an early Swiss linen fragment has been attributed to elderberries and several early dye references from Germany, Italy and Sweden include recipes for bilberries. (Ref: Cardon p243 – 250) Of course, it is not surprising that early dyers would make use of what was growing around them. However nowadays, when we have access to so many excellent dyes from all over the world, dyers are able to select the most reliable dyes for their purposes and no longer have to make do with whatever is available locally.

The other reference I came across recently in a magazine was to the use of nettles, Urtica dioica, to dye camouflage military uniforms in the First World War. I know that nettles were used to produce fibres for cloth for military uniforms during the First and Second World Wars, but I had not heard before that they were also used as a khaki dye. Certainly, in wartime when it would have been important to find cheap, local sources of dye colour, the use of nettles sounds perfectly sensible. Nettles give various shades of yellow or brown, depending on the time of year when they are harvested, and the use of iron would give a khaki colour. I suppose it’s also possible that the same nettles could be used for both fibres and dye colour.

Does anyone else know of similar unexpected dye sources from the past?

Here are further details of the fungi I used recently and the colours I achieved from each.

Note: A = no mordant, B = 10% alum mordant, 1 = no modifier, 2 = washing soda modifier, 3 =  iron modifier. The order of samples for each fungus is: 1A 1B, 2A 2B, 3A 3B

The extra, usually larger, skeins are from the exhaust dyebaths and are alum-mordanted.

These colours come from a dyebath of a mixture of Cortinarius croceus and other orange- and yellow-gilled species of Cortinarius.

This shows, on the left,  colours from Hydnellum aurantiacum  and on the right, colours from Tapinella atrotomentosa.

These colours are from Phaeolus schweinitzii. The green shades from the exhaust dyebath were modified using iron.

These colours are from Cortinarius sanguineus

These colours are from Pisolithus tinctorius