Anita Hart wrote:
That's been my experience here in Northern NH, USA also -
yellow and gold are easy to get, but I've never got what
I would call a brown. A nice green with an evergreen
fern and rusty color from black cherry chips, but yellow
and gold mostly.
I did all my experimenting in New York, near Albany. I
found some yellows and golds, but mostly browns. I can find
only three labeled samples -- I was sure I'd saved out a
pile of grays to use as a border on a commercially-dyed pair
of socks, but if I did, I've put them in a safe place.
The samples are three tan skeins dyed with strawberry
leaves. Plain is a slightly grayish tan, with vinegar is a
little darker than plain strawberry leaves, and with alum is
lighter, brighter, and yellower.
On our .7-mile walk yesterday evening, I noticed that the
pokeweed still had green leaves, and wondered whether there
is color in them -- the berries have lots of color, though
it's fugitive. I felt the urge to pick some leaves and try
them with the little undyed skein I had found with the
samples. Alas for such a plan, it was not my pokeweed. Not
to mention that I haven't any special dyepots, so I'm a bit
reluctant to dye with plants that I wouldn't eat. I *think*
that out-of-season poke sallet merely makes you sick to the
stomach, but I *know* that it's toxic. But on returning
home, I saw mulberry limbs in tempting reach, picked a
handful of leaves, chopped them up with the scissors I keep
for opening packages, plopped them into a pot with maybe six
yards of yarn, a pint of tap water that leaves rusty stains
on pavement, and a glug of vinegar. After an hour over low
heat, the yarn looked pale, dirty gray through the
barely-discolored bath -- well, duh, why is it that people
feed silkworms on mulberry leaves instead of, say, oak
leaves? Oak leaves and walnut leaves would certainly be a
better bet, but I can't reach the oak leaves, and the
walnuts have been bare for some time. There are plenty of
walnut hulls to be gathered up off the road, but I already
know what walnut hulls do, which is to dye firmly and
permanently on the slightest contact with any protein, not
only without mordant, but without heat. And I don't have
any dressy gloves to wear until stained epidermis wears off.
Walnut dye, by the way, is also found in the leaves,
twigs, bark, and wood -- and probably in the roots too,
though I don't recall reading anybody say they'd tried it.
So you can dye walnut any time of the year.
Whatever, I put a pinch of alum -- pickling alum, not dying
alum -- in the water, simmered another hour, and left it to
cool overnight. Much to my surprise, the skein was a pale
but bright and clear green when I took out out of the bath
and rinsed it. Alas, as it dried, it faded to a bright ecru
that I imagine the rest of you would call yellow.
I suspect that part of the difference in our reports is that
I count ecru, beige, tan, yellowy brown, greenish brown,
rusty brown, golden brown, taupe, etc. as shades of brown.
I have a pair of socks with three stripes each that anybody
would call brown and -- miracle! -- was able to match them
up with one set of the notes I took in the early nineties.
The top stripe on each sock is helpfully noted as "bunch of
stuff".
The fifth stripe on Sock A is noted "catnip with vinegar and
iron, gray-green." It is, in fact, medium brown. Perhaps
countless washings in irony water have taken their toll? I
also noticed, back then, that the blue liquid laundry
detergent I was using at the time tended to darken
iron-mordanted colors.
The ninth stripe is darker and grayer than the fifth; it is
noted "catnip, alum, tin-can lid (divided skein) dark
olive-gray or forest green"
"Divided skein" means that this stripe also occurs on Sock
B, so there is only one new color to look up:
The eighth stripe on Sock B is darker and less red than the
fifth stripe on Sock A; it is noted "Catnip leaves, greyish
yellowish beige" -- just plain catnip leaves? C'mon, gang,
catnip is supposed to dye *yellow*!
I also note that the dandelion root two stripes above, which
is noted "Dandelion root, copper pre-mordant, beige" has
faded to variegated dark and light tan. (Vegetable dyes
seem to be just a tad off in their understanding of the word
"fade". The stripes of food color have gotten lighter
with the passing years.)
---------------
I no longer know when "yesterday" was. I was planning to
sort through the socks in my mending basket for other
dark-brown stripes -- there has to be some iron-mordanted
rhubarb in there somewhere -- but this post is already way
too long. I'll write again if something turns up some
Tuesday -- I've been darning socks while waiting for a
Sewing Circle that doesn't show, and I put another sock in
the drawer when I got home yesterday. At the rate I'm
going, I'll get through a five-year backlog, or at least see
them all, by New Year.
Another thing I noticed on that walk is that the walnuts are
doing a magnificent job of dyeing the puddles they've fallen
into, and no stink. Perhaps it blows away as fast as it
forms. I believe I recently read a recipe for dyeing brown
and black by soaking a mix of wool and walnut hulls cold:
two weeks for brown and three for black. (Times are a wild
guess.) Same book had a recipe for dyeing plant fibers gray
with butternut hulls, which cleared up a a long-standing
puzzle: "The Blue and the Gray" vs. "butternut-dyed
uniforms". Apparently only plant fibers can be colored gray
with this recipe -- well, the Confederates did have ample
access to cotton. Don't know how they got it spun and
woven. I do recall reading that sewing thread was in short
supply.
Frustrating book. I was interested in what various plant
materials do; the writer assumed I had a color in mind and
wanted to look up how to get it. There was no
cross-reference between the recipes for black and brown that
differed only by one word, for example.
--
Joy Beeson
http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/
http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/
http://n3f.home.comcast.net/ -- Writers' Exchange
http://www.timeswrsw.com/craig/cam/ (local weather)
west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A.
where it's a warm sunny fall day.
(on the day of writing; on the day of mailing, it's raining.
All this wet was great while the corn was growing, but now
it's time to dry it out and pick it.)
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