And More on Dyeing

Wooo Hooooo - I took the Sciences Award at Crown for the Walnut Dye Project. I entered all 3 - Walnut, Vine and Walnut Ink. I received lots of great feedback on the Walnut Dye. The judges were "UPSET" because I choose to make the Vine a separate project. My thinking was that while the history was very similar, the chemistry, recipe and project were different. They DISAGREED and one judge even refused to award points for the project. Any way - here is what the entries looked like at the event:


The walnut dyeing was interesting. In the 3rd dyeing round I was unable to reproduce the wonderful darkness of the prior round with pre-mordanted fibers. Only in Round 2 with the post mordant did I get true black. Very....... interesting............
Here is what all the walnut dyeing looked like:

The brick color is the iron mordant alone. The blacker browns are the round 3 with the pre-iron mordanting. Sigh!!!!

Today, just to finish off the pound of wool, I did onion skin dyeing - a brick red result. I still have a pound of undyed wool left and haven't decided what to do with it. I'm thinking of taking all the dyed yarns and knitting them up into a piece of fabric. Then felting it. Then making it up into a Viking Haversack. These have become all the rage. A pouch of about the size to hold a 3" 3-ring binder. Very useful and marginally documentable (a la what the Iceman carried). The knitting portion might make a good mindless project for the trip.

The trip is slowly taking shape and things are being ticked off the TO DO list. The rest of today is taxes so guess I'd better stop here and face the paperwork - blech!

When I return from the trip I'll get to the back log of things to web - all the dyeing and ink projects, the last round of medieval food recipes (lamb bits), several articles from the Guild newsletter -- all my articles are kept on my website so they can be updated as appropriate, new needlework projects, etc. Lots to web.