perpetual dyebath

I decided to give over one of my dye pots to seeing what happens if a dye is kept going and added to over time. I started with a little pile of leftover dyestuffs, 100g each of coreopsis flowers from the garden, osage chips, sappanwood chips, buckthorn, and eupatorium, that I had used to make extracts for printing pastes. Cooking up those leftovers yielded a lovely soft orange.

Here’s some wool roving, linen, and cotton simmering in the vat.

Here’s that wool roving overdyed with indigo; the deep orange spots are where the cheesecloth bag of coreopsis was nestled up against it.

On the second day I added a teaspoon of lac extract. It made the orange deeper but left tiny red dots of undissolved dye everywhere.

Enjoy this camera reflection in a reddish vat.

On the third day I added some henna powder and a cheesecloth bag of dried, shredded eucalyptus leaves along with a bit of spent logwood dyebath to top up the liquid. I don’t recommend combining henna and eucalyptus unless you like your studio to smell foul for days. But it shifted the dye back to a nice light orange.

Here’s a photo of the 3rd day fabric in the drying rack. I treated half the fabric in 2% WOF ferrous sulfate and shifted it to that dull olive below, which got me so excited I dumped the rest of the ferrous solution into the dye vat and stripped my dress off and tossed that in too. The dress didn’t get dark enough and had to be dyed one more time, and now my perpetual dyebath is tainted with iron. Whoopsie!

Here’s that 4th iteration of the vat with the iron added and the dress and other fabric simmering.

And here’s the fabric from the first four days. From top: the original orange; orange deepened with lac extract and tiny red spots of undissolved lac (not sure until it’s been washed out whether those spots are permanent); a different orange from a smellier vat; smelly orange dipped in 2% ferrous sulfate; olive drab from ferrous added to the vat.

Now this vat will be for mucking up and saddening too-bright colours, until enough of the iron is exhausted that I can start shifting the vat back to happier colours.