WOOL DYING ( CHEMICAL AND NATURAL)

CHEMICAL DYING

 

This course used alot of mathematical equations to figure out the weight of the materials, and how much dyes you need for the material. Also, there is alot of time spent just sitting and stirring the wood pot, and waiting for the next step to commence. I found out that chemical dying was not my thing. 

Here I used a chemical dye to dye this grey wool.

I used a SUPRALAN RED to get this colour. I accidentlly used the wrong amount of ingredients but the end result was good.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Here I am in the boiling process of the red wood      

 

 

 

             In this photo the  wool is drying. If you notice the bottom far right hand wool has felted in the process.     

I Also tried different colours, pink, greens,aqua, dark green, olive green, rusts, light olive green, which you will see in the next picture below as well.

 

 

In this photo is a brownish blanket that I want to dye red.

We chose the largest pot possible to have the room for the blanket to easy move about, which helps it to absorb as much colour as possible.

The blanket was laid out to dry flat. The colour took really well. ( To be honest we where very sceptical that it would turn out)                                                                                               

NATURAL PLANT DYING 

 

 This course was much more interesting than the chemical dying. This is something that I can do at home as well.  I was really surprised on how well the natural plants gave such wonderful colours to the wool. I boiled yellow Tansy flowers to see what kind of natural dye I would get from them.

 

 

 Preparing Porcini mushrooms for dying

 

In the first left hand dyed wool, I used the mushroom colour to dye this. Then in the middle picture I had the Tansy flower ( the reason they are two different colours, are one ball was originally white, and the other was a grey). The right hand purple wool was dyed using Saskatoon berries. (these ones as well were dyed using a white wool on the second to last wool, and the last purple wool I used a grey wool).

 

This photo shows the dyed wool using a different lighting.In the middle section of this photo I used Madder root, to dye the orange. then I used the same dyed water and made a lighter orange, and then once more and got the yellowish colour. I was very happy with the end results.

Porcini mushrooms, Tansy, Madder root, and Saskatoon berries make up all these beautiful coloured wools.