Isabella Whitworth

probably more than natural and synthetic dyes, wax, resists, and history

Category Archives: Natural dyes


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Long time no post: courses update

It’s time to take up the old quill pen and brush the rust and spiders from my WordPress files. I am horrified to find it is almost a year since I posted – and I apologise. I am still here, but life has been very busy with new and ongoing research, teaching, presentations, looking after the garden, fundraising and various distractions I don’t need to trouble you with.

I have two courses coming up in June and two more in August. I’m listing them in chronological order:

RHS Rosemoor, Great Torrington, Devon

Natural Dyes: Start with a Scarf

June 10th, 2023

This course is set up to teach the basics of natural dyeing but also to create a dyed silk scarf to take home. I’ll also throw in some fascinating history plus tales about dyes and their individual stories. Students will learn how to prepare fabrics and dyes, and how to mordant silk. By the end of the day, students will dye a beautiful silk scarf using simple decorative techniques. If there is dye plant material growing in the Education Garden we will also be able to use some of it.

Book here

West Dean College (nr Chichester, Sussex)

Creative Dyeing on Silk

23rd – 25th June 2023

Work with vibrant steam-fixed dyes to explore various ways of creating designs and patterns on silk. You can use different silk weights and types and will use wax resist, several shibori techniques and some resist fluids, either separately or in combination. Sample pieces can be worked on small frames by using wax applied with brushes, traditional tjantings, stamps and found objects. You will layer wax and dye to create more complex patterns. The wax-out and steaming processes will be demonstrated and explained. All these techniques are suited to painting fabric lengths too and can also be adapted for use with natural dyes.

Scarves are generally worked on the frames provided and scarf blanks or silk fabric will be available to buy. You may also bring your own scarf blanks, preferably oblong in shape, but no larger than 180 x 45 cm.

The course will suit those of you starting out in the medium of dyeing and silk painting, or those with a little experience who want to broaden your knowledge. Those who don’t feel confident about drawing, planning and creative design are especially welcome and the tutor will demonstrate how to plan simple and effective designs without stress.

Booking and details here

RHS Rosemoor, Great Torrington, Devon.

Natural Dyes: Dyeing the Rainbow 

August 5th 2023

Learn how to use natural dyes and dye a rainbow of colours. The course will focus on different groups of plants which dye yellows, reds and browns, and learn the basics of making an indigo vat to dye blue.  The course will also offer a brief introduction to the world of natural dyes and their rich history.

Students will dye with a wide selection of plant materials plus cochineal, an insect dye.

Some basic dye chemistry will be outlined as well as the preparation processes which fibre, yarn and fabric must undergo before dyeing. During the course students will dye a selection of reference samples on silk which they will take home. Overdyeing, and varying vat concentrations, will produce a selection of shades and a rainbow of colours.

Booking and details here

West Dean College (nr Chichester, Sussex)

A First Dip into Natural Dyes

18th – 20th August 2023

This course offers a hands-on introduction to the world of natural dyes and their rich and ancient history. Weld, madder, cochineal and indigo will be used, which all of these derive from plant material except cochineal, an insect dye. You can expect to use raw dyestuff as well as natural dyes available in extract form, and learn vital essentials of preparing materials before dyeing. There will be a practical session on mordanting with alum and cream of tartar, and other mordants will be outlined.

The tutor will also introduce the basics of making a natural indigo vat and two indigo vats, at different strengths, will be available.

Some simple dye chemistry will be outlined to enable you to prepare dyestuffs and dyes effectively and learn how to make and calculate stock solutions. You will dye a selection of reference samples on silk and cotton fabrics and wool yarn, using the four dyestuffs. Overdyeing combinations of dyes and using varying dye concentrations will result in a wide range of colours.

You will have the additional option of producing a natural-dyed silk scarf or small individual samples, and simple resist and dip-dye techniques will be demonstrated.

Please note that some of the dye materials and equipment used on this course will have come into contact with various nuts, so may not be suitable for those with nut allergies or sensitivity to dye plants.

Booking and details here

Links

West Dean College of Arts and Conservation here

RHS Rosemoor here


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RHS Rosemoor: Course in Natural Dyes

Green leaves of Japanese indigo are shown in top of a pink, white and purple silk scarf with a stylised floral motif. There are small seed-like grains on the right which are cochineal
Top left: wax resist scarf dyed in indigo and cochineal; leaves of Persicaria tinctoria and cochineal grains. Underneath left: fringed wool scarf dyed a deep purple in cochineal and indigo

Teaching has so long been off my radar I can’t quite believe that my first course for 18 months is rapidly approaching. I will be at RHS Rosemoor in North Devon on 25th and 26th September for a hands-on introduction to using natural dyes. With a bit of luck students will end up as bonkers as I am about natural colour and its ancient history – and will leave with a great set of dyed samples and a beautiful, individually-dyed scarf.

For overseas readers, RHS stands for the Royal Horticultural Society. The RHS is the UK’s leading gardening charity and owns five beautiful gardens across the country. RHS Rosemoor is one of them and it’s just up the road from me. I have visited it countless times since I moved to Devon nearly twenty years ago. On my visits I often noticed some of the plants that yield dye colour and thought it would be a wonderfully appropriate place to run a course.

In 2019 I contacted the Education and Learning Manager and found her to be very receptive to the idea. The Manager was the late Sarah Chesters, a bright, funny and delightful gardening expert who was also very knowledgeable about textiles and fibre. She was engagingly interested in all I told her about natural dyeing and came to my house on a memorable day when I was working with Jenny Balfour Paul: we showed her how my indigo crop was processed, shared lunch, and we all laughed a lot.

So I was very saddened to hear that Sarah died earlier this year, and I will actively remember her warmth and humour when I am teaching at Rosemoor.

Booking through RHS Rosemoor here


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The Loom Shed Online Natural Dye Symposium

Left: Perkin’s mauve; centre, Tyrian purple threads and murex shells; right; orchil lichen, orchil-dyed silk and wool

At the end of the month I’ll be taking part in an online symposium run by The Loom Shed. What is The Loom Shed? Well, it’s a shed and it has looms in it. But weaving isn’t all that’s planned at this new and imaginative venue.

The Loom Shed has been set up by Louise Cottey, weaver and tutor, and Liz Croft, crochet specialist, weaver and tutor. Both Laura and Liz are passionate about yarn craft and the benefits to mental health that craft work can bring.

My talk Pursuing Purple: Shellfish, Lichen and Mauve will follow some of the dye trails I discovered when researching a nineteenth century industrial archive. If you follow my blog you’ll know I became particularly intrigued by the dye trade in lichen, historically used for making a purple dye called orchil. My findings very unexpectedly linked two other famous purple dyes: Imperial or Tyrian Purple, and Perkin’s Mauve.

The Natural Dye Symposium is on June 26th and will offer a day of talks by four specialist natural dye speakers. It was decided to hold the event online this year but in the future there will be dye-related workshops and events at The Loom Shed itself, which is located in East Devon. There is also a varied programme of speakers and courses and you can look at their Events page to see the latest listings.

On June 10th at 12.45 pm I will be doing an Instagram Live with Liz Croft. You can Insta-follow me on @whitworthisabella, and The Loom Shed at @the_loom_shed

The Loom Shed Online Natural Dye Symposium Programme

Aviva Leigh 10.00 am – 11.00 am Strips, Stripes and Satins – Exploring 18th Century Norwich Textiles

Isabella Whitworth 11.30 am – 12.30 pm Pursuing Purple: Shellfish, Lichen and Mauve

Luisa Aribe 1.30 pm – 2.30 pm An Indigo Journey

Susan Dye 3.00 pm – 4.00 pm Growing and Using your own Dye Garden

There is an ‘all day’ ticket for all four talks, or you can book in for individual speakers here

Times given are British Summer Time

Links

The Loom Shed

The Loom Shed Events page


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Knitwits: Knitting the Blue Stockings

Indigo-dyed wool showing how adjustments in vat concentration and multiple dips can achieve many shades

Once in a while a seemingly mundane request, such as ‘could you look at some old boxes from the attic’ explodes like a dandelion head and breezes into all corners of your life. That happened to me in 2007 and the research it led to is well documented on this website.

About a month ago I had a simple-sounding request from Nicole Pohl. Would I, the email innocently requested, ‘talk on Zoom for ten minutes about dyeing wool?’ Nicole Pohl is Professor of English at Oxford Brookes University and the Editor in Chief of the Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online (EMCO), a charity that was set up to digitise and edit all known letters by the ‘Bluestocking woman’ Elizabeth Montagu. I looked up Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestockings and was intrigued. This was going to be about more than just blue wool.

It meant I would have to learn how to present a Powerpoint via Zoom, compress the subject of natural dyes and what I know about eighteenth century dyestuff into ten minutes and, along the way, include a section on blue-dyeing. Anyone who knows how to dye with indigo or woad will understand what that means. Nicole said there’d also be presentations by two other speakers, plus the input of a knitwear designer. A group of academics would then start knitting blue stockings…. it all sounded a bit of a lark, so I said I’d do it.

Then I learned that one speaker is Susan North, Curator of Fashion, 1550–1800, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Another is Lis Gernerd, a historian of eighteenth century dress, art and material culture. The knitwear designer is none other than Kate Davies whose very recently launched Bluestocking Club has hit over 2000 members. All of them are invited to the Zoom event on Monday 24th May 1600 – 1700 UK time.

You are invited too. It’s free but you have to book, so do it fast as numbers are limited. Here is the link.

https://www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brookes/events/knitwits–knitting-the-bluestockings/

I think its time for a gin and tonic – and it’s only half past two.

Links

The Bluestocking Club

A conversation between Kate Davies and Nicole Pohl on Kate’s site here

Elizabeth Montagu Online


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Mulberry silk

I have been trying to find a more satisfying source of silk than commercial, sparkling white, smooth and ‘perfect’ cloth imported from China. Since last autumn I have been working on mulberry silk, a handwoven ‘heritage’ cloth from India whose export and sale is supporting handweavers in West Bengal. Its natural colour is a pale creamy yellow. Slubs and weave imperfections in the shawls I have chosen are part of their intrinsic beauty.

I mordant the scarves in alum and cream of tartar (unless I’m only dyeing with indigo) and I either dye a pale base or start from the natural silk colour. The wax and dye is worked in layers, with each layer and colour building up a pattern as I block areas out with wax. The designs are loosely based on forms of virus – which are helpful and unhelpful to the human race – and frequently look very pretty through a microscope.

A madder-dyed shawl will be exhibited in the Spring Show at the Devon Guild of Craftsmen, which starts on 29th May

Despite the technique being slow and methodical it isn’t without hazards, mostly due to my senior lapses in concentration. I have overheated the dye vessel (the wax melted); I’ve placed a pattern motif in the wrong place, and I’ve left a small piece of masking tape on the cloth, which efficiently resisted the indigo and left a mark. Because the shawls are expensive I feel very upset when I mess one of them up, but minor wobbles or mistakes reflect the handwoven beauty of the scarves themselves, so I try to be philosophical about it. The cloth is full of slubs, and often shows an uneven density of warp threads which affect the dye take-up. More fibre takes up more dye, so the cloth can have variations in colour. They are utterly fiendish to photograph as they are very lustrous and the colour appears to change all the time.

Shawl below dyed in walnut leaf and indigo

  • Wax on base layer of straw yellow
  • A weak indigo vat was used to dye a very pale blue on the yellow
  • A stronger blue vat was used at layer 4
  • Layer 4 detail
  • Layer 5 also showing a dipped border, using a stronger indigo vat

Details of the forthcoming Spring Show at the Devon Guild of Craftsmen here


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Exeter Cloth Dispatch Book 1763 – 1765 (2)

A selection of wool samples from the Dispatch Book

In 2017 a rare 18th century cloth merchant’s dispatch book of Claude Passavant, a Swiss émigré, was discovered in the London Metropolitan Archives by Todd Gray, a well-known historian from Exeter in England’s South-West. Exeter was internationally renowned for all aspects of cloth production, not least dyeing, but few records survive. Realising that no-one had studied Passavant’s book, which contains almost 2,500 wool samples, most of them dyed in a range of vibrant colours, Gray assembled specialist authors to write thirteen chapters for a book on the local and wider contexts of 18th century cloth making. I co-authored the one on contemporary dyes and dyeing techniques with Jenny Balfour Paul. Jenny is a writer, artist, lecturer and traveller, internationally known for her research into indigo and natural dyes.  Other chapters in the richly illustrated book include a history of Exeter’s cloth merchants, the archaeology of Exeter’s cloth industry, fulling mills and merchants’ seals.

There has already been excellent national and local press coverage of this book and the story behind its discovery.

The Exeter Cloth Dispatch Book 1763-5, edited by Todd Gray, launches on 19th February, and is available at a special discount price of £25 from Keith Stevens at http://www.stevensbooks (sales@themintpress.co.uk) or (01392 459760. Otherwise it is on sale at £35 from publishers Boydell & Brewer and can also be found on the usual bookseller outlets.

I wrote a little more about my involvement with this project last year, and you can read it here.

The above images show details of the actual Dispatch Book held in the London Metropolitan Archives, including wool samples and associated balemarks, and the recently published book edited by Todd Gray. Gray’s publication includes images of all pages of the Dispatch Book.


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Purple stains

stain

A very obvious spill of orchil left this 1853 letter stained, with loose deposits of a powdery purple substance on the surface

This is my 38th day in coronavirus lockdown. Like many, I have a diary full of scratched-out teaching, appointments, celebration parties and anticipated trips. I haven’t felt particularly creative for the past few weeks and admire the achievements of those who use their daily exercise to draw and paint and record their experiences visually, or translate their time into the positivity of making work. I feel as though that particular tap ran dry for me a few weeks back. It’s a bit weird but I don’t feel bad about it, it just is. I have found other things to do.

When I’ve not been gardening, or training the new puppy, or learning to make videos,   I’ve been working on family history links with England, USA, Ireland and Ecuador. And with no other distractions or excuses I have finally managed to get my teeth back into the Leeds-related archiving I’ve been undertaking for some years. You can find other blogs about this research in the ‘word cloud’ on the right, under the search titles Wood & Bedford, orchil, and Yorkshire Chemicals.

Over these weeks of lockdown the archived boxes of labelled documents are growing, the unsorted papers are diminishing.  Most nights when I turn out the light and go to wash my hands (in a non-coronavirus way) there is a trace of pink or purple in the dirty, soapy water. I know it’s from orchil. The earlier papers, dating  between 1833 and 1855, came from a time when many of the working spaces of Wood & Bedford adjoined. The Fire Insurance document of 1855 describes these workspaces and some of the equipment. Orchil lichen was ground into powder with stones before manufacturing into dye, after which it was reduced back into powder (cudbear), or sometimes paste. Orchil dust would have hovered permanently, coating surfaces and settling on any uncovered papers. I have sorted papers with heavy purple stains, as if spills took place where they were stored, and there’s even a purple thumbprint on the back of an invoice for glass and earthenware. This gave me a real archival shiver because at that time (1850) there was just one person, James Bedford (1824 – 1903), who would have been working on orchil at the Hunslet address: the move to Kirkstall Road was imminent but had yet to take place. I have developed a very healthy respect for James and I like to think it is his thumbprint on the paper. It feels like a kind of handshake.

orchil2

Back of an 1850 invoice showing a purple thumbprint

I also found an 1853 letter stained with a large spill, which had resulted in several crusty deposits of a loose and powdery purple (see top image). I am neither equipped nor funded to conserve these papers and have stored the heavily stained ones separately so that at some time in the future there is the potential for them to be studied further. But while I was working a tiny deposit loosened off and I rescued it, putting it in a container with a little water. I checked it impatiently, and slowly, over several hours, the powder began to release its colour. It shows a typical fresh purple orchil pink. Amazing to see, and a rewarding moment that joins several other highlights in many years’ work on this archive. I will drop a few silk fibres in once I think all the colour has been released, and see if it will still dye.

IMG_9520

Orchil dye reconstituted from the 167-year-old orchil spill. The colour is typical of orchil

It’s intended that my section of the archive will finally join the main Yorkshire Chemicals collection already in the curation of the West Yorkshire Archive Service facility at Morley, Leeds. Wood & Bedford became the lead company of the Yorkshire Dyeware and Chemical Company in 1900, which was renamed Yorkshire Chemicals from 1974 – 2004 when it went into administration. The work on the Morley archive was completed by Dr Howard Varley who had been an employee of Yorkshire Chemicals until its demise. The complete set of archives will give a rare insight into the lifespan of a dye manufacturing company whose work spanned the transition from natural to synthetic dyes.

 

 

 

 


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Exeter Cloth Dispatch Book 1763 – 1765 (1)

Passavant_edited-1

Detail of the Exeter cloth dispatch book shows several wool samples and their associated bale-mark. Image courtesy of the London Metropolitan Archives. For full reference to this document please see link at foot of page

Late last year I was contacted by a friend with a very interesting proposal. She had been invited to write a chapter on dyes and dyeing for a ‘book about a book’ and asked if I would be interested in co-authoring. A very rare, cloth merchant’s dispatch book had been found in the London Metropolitan Archives by Todd Gray, a well-known Exeter-based historian, and as yet – amazingly – no-one had made a study of it.

Todd was editing a book (Exeter Cloth Dispatch Book 1763 – 5) about his find, to be published by the Devon and Cornwall Record Society (DCRS) this autumn. He was assembling specialist authors to write chapters giving a wide context to the dispatch book. These were to include a history of Exeter’s cloth merchants, the archaeology of the cloth industry in Exeter, fulling mills, Exeter’s dyers, lead cloth merchants’ seals, and tillet blocks (look them up, they’re fascinating). And, of course, a chapter on dyes and dyeing.

A dispatch book is neither a ‘sales‘ book to show potential customers, nor a dyer’s book recording dyestuffs and recipes. It records dyed cloth sold, in this case exported, between 1763 and 1765, and relates to the South West. There are bale-marks drawn on many pages. It is a collection of wool cloth samples (all 2,475 of them) and was the one-time property of a wealthy Swiss émigré of Huguenot descent, named Claude Passavant. Passavant had strong connections to the city of Exeter and in the 1750s established a factory producing high quality Gobelin-style carpets there; he was also a cloth merchant. 

The friend who invited me to co-author is Jenny Balfour Paul, a world authority on indigo. In the early 1990s I attended one of her lectures at the Crafts Council in London and her knowledge and enthusiasm for indigo pushed me in the entirely new direction of natural dyes, and we also became friends. So I wasn’t going to say no, was I?

figured_edited-1

Four figured fabrics from the Exeter cloth dispatch book. The bale mark from the page reverse can be seen in mirror image, bottom centre. Image courtesy of the London Metropolitan Archives. For full reference to this document please see link at foot of page

Colours are hard to describe, but in my vocabulary the range covered in the dispatch book includes scarlets, dusty and dark salmon pinks, russets, golden browns, tans, beiges, and all manner of blues. There are soft watery-blue-greens, olive and grassy greens and there are blacks and greys. There are several figured weaves among the samples. We have no dye analysis for these cloths but we could make educated guesses about how they were dyed by studying contemporary sources, and literature. Together with Dominique Cardon and Anita Quye, Jenny has been researching the Crutchley Archive, an important set of pattern, recipe and account books from the eighteenth century Crutchley dyeing business in Southwark. This source, and Jenny’s knowledge of it, was a vital part of our interpreting the likely dyes and chemicals used in the dispatch book. We also researched Standerwick’s Somerset Pattern Book (c 1760) located in the Somerset Heritage Centre, maps and journals held at the Devon Heritage Centre in Exeter and other papers located by Todd Gray in Devon archives.

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UPDATE January 2021

The publication of this book, originally scheduled for Autumn 2020, was postponed as a result of the pandemic. It is now scheduled for release on 19th February 2021 and can be ordered from the publishers Boydell and Brewer here

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London Metropolitan Archives 

Cloth book of an Exeter wool merchant, 1763-1765 (London Metropolitan Archives, City of London reference CLC/B/227/MS09803)

Somerset Heritage Centre

Standerwick’s Somerset Pattern Book at Somerset Heritage Centre: SHC, A/ALU/1, ‘John Standerwick of Rydiness [Buckland St Mary] and Hermitage [Broadway], 1717-1777’

Devon Heritage Centre

Devon and Cornwall Record Society homepage

Extract from full bibliography used in chapter 

Crutchley Archive: Anita Quye, Dominique Cardon and Jenny Balfour Paul, ‘The Crutchley Archive: red colours on wool fabrics from master dyers in Southwark, London 1716-1744’ in Textile History (forthcoming 2020)

By Dominique Cardon: Mémoires de teinture: Voyage dans le temps chez un maître des couleurs (Paris, 2013); The Dyer’s Handbook: Memoirs of an 18th Century Master Colourist (Oxford and Philadelphia, 2016); Des couleurs pour les Lumières: Antoine Janot, teinturier occitan 1700-1778 (Paris, 2019);  Le Cahier de Couleurs d’Antoine Janot /Workbook, Antoine Janot’s Colours (Paris, 2020).

William Partridge: A Practical Treatise on the Dying of Woollen Cloth, Cotton and Skein Silk (New York, 1823)

Carolyn Griffiths, ‘Woad to This’ and the Cloth Trade of Frome (Frome, 2017)


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New book: dye lakes and recipes

Since I started teaching natural dyes at West Dean College, I have had a problem. How could I save, transport and use litres of expensive dye not fully exhausted on the course? I travel with two large beer-making flagons containing indigo, but transporting additional containers of weld, madder and cochineal isn’t feasible – and I hate waste.

For some years I have been working with my friend and colleague Yuli Sømme, who commissions me to dye different shades of wool felt for her company Bellacouche, in Moretonhampstead (see link below). If I have pieces of mordanted and wetted-out felt ready, I can dunk it into the vats on the final night at the College, and by the next morning much of the used dye is exhausted and the felts dyed. I can rinse out the felts and take them home in empty buckets. The exhausted dye can be discarded.

But if students need the vats on the final day, or I am travelling home the day I finish teaching, I don’t have the option of using Yuli’s felt and the leftover dyes.

The Art and Science of Natural Dyes: by Catharine Ellis and Joy Boutrop

A newly-published book by Catharine Ellis and Joy Boutrop has encouraged me to experiment with making lake pigments from the leftover dyes at West Dean. Their suggested process greatly reduces the volume to be transported and involves binding the leftover dye to the alum mordant, thus turning it into a concentrated lake pigment. The pigment is precipitated using alum and soda ash and sinks to the bottom of the vessel, leaving the water on the surface, which can be poured off.

Madderlake2

Making a madder lake. You can see the dye beginning to precipitate and separate from the water

The resulting substance is strained through cloth and when this process is complete, a gooey, paste-y mixture like thick custard remains.

filtering

Straining the madder pigment through a cloth

By reversing the chemical process at home, again using the instructions in the book,  I can dye pieces of wetted-out felted wool – which do not require a mordant.

It is typical of this book, which in its entirety covers a very wide range of natural dye processes, that methods are well-explained, options or alternatives outlined, and reasons given for certain instructions. Recipes are clear and easy to follow and I would have greatly valued the book in my library when I started natural dyeing because of its comprehensive treatment of the subject and a thoroughly researched, straightforward approach. I will write more in future posts because I am still learning so much from the work of these two authors.

Since my West Dean course last month I have made pigments from madder and weld lakes, and tried mixing them with indigo and earth pigments.

pigments

Madder and weld pigments (pink and yellow) and overpaints of earth pigments sienna and ochre (rusts and red-brown) from Roussillon in France. Painted on soya-sized cotton

Links

The Art and Science of Natural Dyes: Principles, Experiments and Results

At time of writing, this book isn’t readily available in the UK. Check this link on the Blackwell’s site to see if it is in stock.

Bellacouche

Yuli Sømme’s company in Moretonhampstead, Devon

West Dean College Short Courses

My next natural dye course at West Dean is March 27 – 29th 2020.

 


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Dyeing Reds in Amsterdam

safflower_edited-1

Safflower petals before washing

I recently took part in a two-day workshop in Amsterdam, dyeing historical reds on silk at the Rijksmuseum’s Department of Conservation and Restoration. The event was organised by the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands. Selection for the workshop was by application, and the organisers chose eight international participants known for the variety and extent of their expertise in natural dyeing, and / or their interests in historical dye recipes.

A range of 26 samples was produced using American cochineal, kermes, annatto, brazilwood, madder, safflower and lac. Participants worked in pairs dyeing different sets of dyes: my partner was Paula Hohti of Aalto University, Helsinki, where she is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Culture. We dyed three recipes in total: one for lac and two for safflower. Demineralised water was used throughout.

Lac Our lac recipe was adapted from Edelstein’s translation of the 1548 edition of The Plictho of Gioanventura Rosetti. We prepared and used an alum mordant on Day 1, in which the silk rested overnight. The stick lac we were to use had been extracted over the previous three days. On Day 2 we sieved the lac solution and heated it, adding 25% (to weight of dry fabric) cream of tartar. It was dyed for an hour.

lac

Lac-dyed silk being lifted from the beaker to check for colour. On the right is the beaker containing yellow safflower dye and silk

Safflower We dyed two versions of safflower: yellow and red. Our recipes were adapted from various sources, including Macquer’s Art de la Teinture en Soie. To obtain yellow, safflower florets were washed once and drained, and then soaked again for 30 minutes. After sieving, the resulting extract was used to dye unmordanted silk.

safflower

First washing-out of the safflower florets for yellow dyeing

To obtain red, safflower florets were pre-washed for two weeks to remove all traces of the yellow extract – this process had been completed in advance of the workshop.  We undertook a further sequence of washings until the yellow stopped running and the water was clear. The water was sieved out. Potash was added to obtain pH 10, and the florets squeezed by hand until they appeared pink and transparent and the liquor looked pinky red. This took about half an hour to achieve.

After sieving into a new beaker, unmordanted silk was added and the pH checked (it was around 7). We then added fermented beer (bierken) little by little, continually monitoring pH, until the pH dropped to a crucial pH 5. This threshold pH has a term ‘virer le bain‘ or ‘turn the bath’. We were required not to allow the pH to drop lower or it would damage the silk. The silk then rested in the dye for 10 minutes after which it was washed in Marseilles soap, and water.

Both safflower baths produced strong colours, with the pink having an especially bright ‘pop’. The colour is very light fugitive.

3dyes

Safflower red (left), lac (centre) safflower yellow (right

Everyone, including the three organisers, gave short presentations on their work and research interests. I showed some samples of my orchil dyeing as well as a few pieces of my studio work in natural dyes. Many participants were involved in education, some of us were artists and dyers, others were textile researchers or art historians. These absorbing presentations illustrated what a privilege it was to attend the workshop.

The results of the workshop were recently published at the Spring Symposium of the Textiel Commissie.

assort

Participants were able to take away a sample of each recipe dyed: a total of 26 samples

Participants took home a complete set of all the silks dyed. The organisers also retained a set, which will be catalogued and stored as historical reproductions on reference sheets, together with supporting information on the recipes and preparations. The sheets will eventually be published online through the Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE) website, for the benefit of other researchers.

Thanks With many thanks to organisers Drs. Ana Serrano, Jenny Boulboullé and Art Proaño Gaibor; to the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands; the Ateliergebouw of the Rijksmuseum; and to all fellow participants at the workshop for their unique and specialist contributions.

Links

Rijksmuseum Conservation and Research

Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands

Textiel Commissie

Paula Hohti has recently been awarded a European Research Council grant for a five year project Re-fashioning the Renaissance: Popular Groups, Fashion and the Material and Cultural Significance of Clothing in Europe 1550 – 1650