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Katrin Hieroglyphs.
23. Februar 2024
Yes, that would sort of fit that aspect - but you can also go from bits of woods to sticks if you ar...
Bruce Hieroglyphs.
23. Februar 2024
I think the closest English equivalent would be 'Down the rabbit hole'. It has one entrance (No, not...
Harma Spring is Coming.
20. Februar 2024
I'm definitely jealous! Mine disapeared except for one pathetic little flower. But the first daffodi...
Gudrun Rallies All Over Germany.
23. Januar 2024
Vielen Dank für den Beitrag. Ja, wir müssen darüber reden, gegen das Vergessen. Zum Glück haben mein...
Anne Decker Aargh.
17. Januar 2024
This is less likely to have an effect on your personal samples as you likely wrap the same way for a...
NOV.
28
0

Red Success.

The dyeing instructions and experiment protocol have been successfully tested:

The results? Two beautifully dyed objects, one set of instructions with notes and corrections, and I've already managed to do the fixing-up and the instructions are sent out. 

(The result this time turned out to be a rather orangey colour, by the way. That might be due to the pre-treatment, or a different batch of madder, or the different alum, or the water, or whatever. Madder. Might drive one madder and madder...)

Now it's time for me to wait and see what will happen. I'm already looking forward to getting the first of the samples and be able to compare them to the original reference. And, well, I guess I could also think about when to start my own homework...

1
NOV.
24
1

More Red.

Here's a better picture of the outcome of our dyeing tests for the variations between different madders and different waters: 

So. Can you see differences? What do you think? 

1
NOV.
22
1

Back home, but with a lot of homework...

I'm back from the Forum and my recuperation afterwards - much needed, and much appreciated, and now it's tackling all the emails that have accumulated, and sending out all the orders that came in, and then... back to normal work plus the Forum homework.

And oh, there's homework. We ran a total of four experiments and one dyeing test during the week (yes, madness indeed). One was the continuation of Micky Schoelzke's exploration of fake purple that she started last year (you can read about that on the Forum homepage). Then I had the splendid idea of trying out mordanting with horsetail (equisetum arvense), which was an experiment on its own. Then there were the dyeing tests - a first trial at reconstructing some early modern recipes for dyeing knitted caps, with the three great providers of red: madder, cochenille, and kermes. Micky had an experiment with madder as well, a spin-off from the fake purple research, using madder root that had been pre-treated in different ways.

And then, of course, there was the Madder Baselines experiment. We had the staggering number of 35 different water samples for testing the dyeing outcome and the influence of the water on the dye result... so that was huge, and ate up all the time available, and then some. Especially since the experiment went not just as planned.

It was rather clear when we were getting ready that the amount of goods was very large for our small beakers - but there's the decision to make between having very small samples (where any fluctuations in amounts of madder, or the quality of the teaspoonful you are using compared to the quality of the second teaspoonful for the next sample will make more of a difference the smaller your samples are) or having larger samples and larger amounts of dyestuff but running the risk of uneven dyeing. 

We decided to go for larger samples and the risk of spotting... which, in retrospective, was not a good decision, as spotting was very, very prominent. So we went for the afterbath - which was another mordanting run, and another dye run. That did not satisfy us with the results, so we decided to use the waters that we had more of to do a second run, with more liquid and thus less of a risk of uneven dyeing. Another batch of samples to make, another mordanting run, another dye run.

And then we had to test the different madders that we got - mordanting and dyeing in de-ionised water, to make things all even and comparable. 

Long (very long!) story short: We did get to see some differences depending on the waters used, but they were not as pronounced as we would have expected them to be. There's also a difference between the different madders. Now the last factor that would need to be checked is... the Human Factor. Because the speed with which you heat your dyebath, the temperature, they also might make a difference. 

Fortunately, most of the Forum participants volunteered in taking part of this experiment, and dyeing a sample at home. Which is why this happened today:

I harvested some more madder from the garden yesterday, and today it was dried enough (I sped the process up a bit) to be ground, and now it can finish dyeing... and then there'll be a test run of my instructions for the volunteers, and then these can be sent out. 

And then we'll see. I am very, very curious if there will be differences visible - after all, it's the same madder, the same samples, the same mordant, the same instructions, and the same water (de-ionised water for the win!). 

What's your guess? Will we have differences? Or will it all look the same? 

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OKT.
30
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Even More Experiment Prep...

Well, the plan for the Madder Baselines is about done - the rest of the planning will have to be done as soon as we know how many samples there will be to handle, and then go for a last check through the long list of steps - before following them through to, hopefully, a nicely colourful end.

Meanwhile I have a second template to turn into a plan and protocol: the template for a mordanting experiment. Common Horsetail is said to contain quite a bit of alum, so it is in theory a replacement for mineral alum which may not have been available everywhere. However, it's not really clear if the horsetail is really suitable for this, mostly because there's no recipe that tells us about amounts necessary, or if there was any other preparation done before using it. Or at least I have not been able to find any...

So the idea was to try out if the plant will work as a mordant, and if yes, how much of it is needed. Because even if it's available, if you need ten times the amount of wool weight to have enough alum, well... that would mean 10 kg of the dried plant for a single kilo of wool, and if you've ever woven fabric, you know that a kilo is a puny amount.

I can think of three different methods of using the plant straight away: as it is (just dried, then soaked, and maybe boiled a bit previously to better get out the contents), fermented, or (which would also reduce the bulk of it) burnt to ashes (which should still contain the metal, though maybe in a different form). 

Obviously, the burning and the using as is do not need extra prep time, but the fermenting does. I'm happy to report that the 100 g of plant that I put into 7 litres of rain water are doing what they are supposed to be doing: Making bubbles and working on changing their smell.

It's not an unpleasant smell (at least not yet), but it is definitely much different from the smell it had at the start (like dried horsetail, but thank you, Captain Obvious). I'm very, very curious already to find out how (or if!) all this will work!

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OKT.
24
2

Freshly Dug Out.

These are madder roots from our garden, freshly dug out. They'll make part of the second part of our experiment on madder dyeing - using different batches of madder with the same water, and see how different they will come out.

Madder is said to get better the longer it matures - first in the ground, then once harvested, resting time of a few years is also said to make it better. But I figure that too-fresh madder may be better than no madder at all...

It will be dried now and then ground up, and I hope for a yield of at least 30 g afterwards (though in a pinch, 10 g would be enough). It would definitely be nice to have some more samples to test. So - do you happen to have a bit of dried madder to spare? Would you be willing to donate 10 to 30 g of it for our experiment?

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OKT.
18
1

Mmh... maybe a little less wool.

Just in case you were curious on how much wool one can fit into a 250 ml lab glass beaker, it's about 12 g of dry goods in this example, consisting of a small skein of yarn and a piece of fabric about 17 cm square:

tIt fits, but there's not much floating possibility... so it might be a good idea to put in a little less wool. Probably a smaller piece of fabric, and maybe a little more yarn to stay at sort-of-sensible amounts (but yarn will be a bit less, um, stiff?).

It's always fascinating to watch things unfold and questions come up when planning an experiment. There's usually a lot of aspects, and one has to decide on how to handle each one, while knowing that in many cases there's no really good solution that will cover all the possibilities..

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OKT.
17
0

Planning, planning, planning.

While I'm doing necessary office work (the books have to be kept once in a while, for tax stuff to be sorted out in time), part of my brain is still nibbling on the madder-water-tests. Especially that part which likes to add more and more things to an experiment... because, well, variables and such. And the good old "but but but there's more to find out, can we not?" thing. Aaah.

Current ponderings are related to the dyestuff, not the water. I had decided, in the start, that we'd use one batch of madder, preferably of at least decent quality, and if possible (very much preferred) of very good quality, to do the test runs. Now one of the colleagues asked "which madder are you planning to use", and I started thinking... It's clear that we will test different waters with the same madder - but should we also test different madder harvests/sources with the same water? There's definitely enough local tap water to do that, and I might be able to get two or three other waters in sufficient quantity to do a comparison of two to four different kinds of madder (well, technically one water would do, but maybe different madder qualities react differently to different waters)... so that would be an option. An option that tickles me, to be honest.

And that's not even dipping a toe, or fingertip, into the whole huge, HUGE topic of assists such as bran, fermented bran, beer, and other plant materials that were sometimes added to the madder bath. I've even read about the roots being roasted beforehand. So, so many things that one could try, and try to figure out what they do. In some cases it's pretty clear, at least part of it - adding sour material such as beer or fermented bran will adjust the pH, which is almost always a factor when dyeing. But what pH is the best one for the madder? And how did the dyers of old know how to dose it? (Well, if you just add beer or bran, you can taste it. That would definitely work.) But is the pH the only thing that will be doing stuff? Or would the fermented bran also do some microorganism magic and act on the madder roots while it all soaks before dyeing? Would the (probably dead) yeasts in the beer add something? Or the alcohol have an effect?

So many questions. It would probably be enough for a doctoral thesis (a pH-D-Thesis, hah!) to figure out all, or at least most, of the influences on the madder. 

Here's hoping that nobody will get mad when we tackle this at the Forum... 

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