Maiwa Natural Dye Workshop: Silk and linen
Week 4 of the Natural Dye Workshop covered silk and linen. Only fabric this time, no yarn. (I do have silk and linen yarn that I want to dye, but it's so time consuming making and dividing skeins that I decided to take a week off. 😓)
We used two types of linen: a natural and a white (which looks rather cream with the tannin). The silk is a paisley habotai jacquard.
Here are the silks after dyeing. From left to right: madder and cochineal (combined dye bath), logwood, and myrobalan.
The madder/cochineal is a super bright, primary red. I used a neglected handheld coffee grinder to grind the bugs this time. (It's been sitting in our garage for ages... and now is part of my dye studio!) The logwood dye bath was a crazy fuchsia purple when I first dipped the dye bag in. It literally looked like I emptied a purple marker into the water.
Here are some more pictures of the fabric, fresh out of the dye baths. It's hard to capture the colors well, so I figure the more images in different lights, the better!
Here are the linens. White is on the top, natural is on the bottom. From left to right: cutch (with calx afterbath), weld, madder.
It's interesting how the white and natural linens look so similar. The whites are slightly brighter.
And for some outdoor shots:
Honestly, I was a little meh with the selection this week (don't love the colors, don't love the paisley), but everything looks lovely all together. Here's my cumulative progress so far. Everything has been divided into three for later studies. It takes eons to divide and serge/wind!
And one small side note: I went foraging for gallnuts on a hike today. Once this workshop is over and I have more time, I'm going to try and make my own tannin baths from these.
