48 Cautionary tales from the dye house

Not that I actually have a dye house, I use my kitchen. Which immediately limits colour possibilities as I refuse to work with anything more toxic than alum in a space where food is prepared. But never fear, I still have plenty of scope for experimentation. And for accidents and emergencies!

Harmful substances - arsenic and mercury among them - were once essential ingredients in the colouring of textiles, and so were smelly ones like stale urine. In fact in times past Jewish wives could sue for divorce if they found the stench of their dyer husband's work unbearable. Mr K. has declared himself to be not too keen on the smell of boiling dandelions, although I don't think he's planning on leaving me just yet! I was hoping he might agree to start peeing in a bucket of a morning - oh yes my lovelies, your fella's urine is absolutely essential to the proper processing of your woad - but maybe I should rethink that!?*

I did give him a fright the other day. I was processing some mouldy lichen I'd 'rescued' from a fallen tree the council were about to chip - lichen makes the most fabulous dye stuff but is so slow growing that it really shouldn't be removed from its natural environment unless it's about to meet a sticky end - and I was wearing a facemask I'd borrowed that was meant for folk working with asbestos but which was usefully preventing me from inhaling any fungal spores. Apparently it gave the impression, when he walked in unawares, that there'd been a bio incident locally!

And I gave myself a fright yesterday, when I bungled things with a pan of hot dye and got a steam scald for my trouble. I swore, a lot, and now have a truly humongous blister on the inside of my wrist, and a much larger area of my inner arm that's just very red and sore**, and a great swathe of bandage that looks like overkill but which the lovely nurse at the GP's surgery, who I popped up to see this morning, insisted was necessary. It doesn't seem like five minutes since she was administering a tetanus shot after I gashed myself on a broken piece of old farm gate I'd intended to use for rust dyeing. I'll be getting a reputation for recklessness if I'm not careful, or maybe lunacy!

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
You might want to skip this bit and jump to the footnotes if you're unlikely to be trying a spot of natural dyeing any time soon, but if you fancy boiling up some dandelions, or daffodils, or dahlias of your own, read on, I have some safety tips for you. Although given recent events you'd be forgiven for double checking them elsewhere

First up, remember natural is not synonymous with safe. Some dye plants are also food stuffs, dandelions and tea leaves included, but others, such as daffodils, are toxic in some way. Indigo is a skin irritant, for example, and so is the sap of cow parsley, and logwood contains toxins that can be inhaled, absorbed through the skin or ingested. Take care. And remember that the adverse effect of many poisons is cumulative over time. (As an aside, natural is also not synonymous with eco-friendly. In fact unless you're picking wild plants or plants you've grown yourself it's quite probable that somewhere between seed and harvest a pesticide, herbicide, or some other 'handle with care' substance got in on the act.)

Set aside dedicated pots, pans and utensils for your dyeing experiments and don't use them again for food.
Store chemical mordants safely away from children. Less than a teaspoon of dyer's alum (aluminium potassium sulphate) could be fatal if ingested by a small child.
Avoid working with plant dyes in your kitchen unless you're confident you're using nothing toxic.
Make sure that wherever you do your mordanting and dyeing is well ventilated.
Use rubber gloves, wear a protective apron, and wear closed shoes in case hot liquids spill.
Wear a suitable face mask when working with fine powders or mouldy plant material.
Don't eat or drink while you're working with mordants and plant dyes.
Carefully dispose of used mordant and dye solutions down external drains or by pouring onto waste ground.

And if you can handle all of that, have fun!

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
* Okay, so I wasn't really, but I've had great fun teasing him about it.

** Should anyone be wondering, that's in spite of running cold water over it for a full half hour, using cooling gel, and encasing it in cling film. Honestly, the things we find ourselves doing for our art!

Picture credit: Wikimedia, Roman fresco from the fullonica (dyer's shop) of Veranius Hypsaeus in Pompeii.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
And finally, thank you m'dears for all your thoughts on the merits of Pimms and pink knitwear. I'm not sure I mention often enough how grateful I am for your continued interest in knitsofacto and the conversations we have here, so in case I don't, I just did!

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Follow the links below to subscribe to free updates via ...
Feedly Bloglovin Email

Never miss a post again.
Google Reader users, don't forget to transfer your subscription before July 1st.

You can also now join us on Ravelry!

68 Pink

Peonies, parrot tulips, white stocks and sweet peas, those are the blooms I can never resist. So why did I buy antirrhinums and hollyhocks for the garden today? Truth is I can't explain the antirrhinums without resorting to words like 'whim' and 'fancy' but the (biennial) hollyhocks came home with me because their deep red flowers are destined for the dye pot next year. The peonies I already had, the very first of the season ... it almost feels like summer, particularly as the evening's events included the mixing of 2013's first jug of Pimms!

I don't generally 'do' pink flowers, with the exception of the above - if you're looking for pink parrot tulips try Tulipa 'Silver Parrot', they're exquisite - but the more I think about that the more I realise how much I've been missing. Hellebores, hyacinths, hydrangeas, geraniums ... why do I almost always buy white varieties? And to pose an equally pressing question, why do I so rarely buy pink yarn?

Are you a Pimm's drinker? Do you have a favourite flower colour? And would you wear pink knitwear? I need to know these things!

Linking with Lou's Nature in the Home.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Today began with the joyous news of a birth, a good friend's second son, and ended with the news of a death. The tragic loss of Kathreen Ricketson of whipup.net and her partner Rob has touched so many in the crafting community. My thoughts are with their family and most particularly their children.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Follow the links below to subscribe to free updates via ...
Feedly Bloglovin Email

Never miss a post again.
Google Reader users, don't forget to transfer your subscription before July 1st.

You can also now join us on Ravelry!

70 Dandelions

Sadly I'm not making dandelion wine - 'summer on the tongue', to borrow from Ray Bradbury - but I am hoping to have dandelion-yellow silks and wools for a spot of summer stitching*. At the moment I'm boiling up the dandelion flowers in one pan while the threads are being mordanted in another. Without a mordant, in this case alum, the fugitive dandelion dye wouldn't 'bite' and would quickly fade.

Mordants are used in such tiny quantities when working with small amounts of fibre ... 3/16 of a teaspoon of alum (aluminium potassium sulphate) is sufficient for the six skeins of silk thread I intend to dye. So I've bought myself a handy set of itty-bitty spoons that measure a dash, a pinch, a smidgen, and a nip. Or 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 and 1/64 of a teaspoon, should you wish to get technical about it. And I've fallen down something of an etymological rabbit hole.

Convinced that the words 'dash', 'pinch', 'smidgen' and 'nip' all pre-dated 'tea-spoon' I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary. And they do. Tea drinking became fashionable during the 1600s when tea was pricey stuff and was measured using small 'tea-spoons' equivalent in size to an apothecaries' dram. Yet pinch denoted the much smaller, 'amount taken up between finger and thumb', at least a century earlier, and Shakespeare wrote about dashes and doses of this and that. So who decided that a pinch was half a dash, a smidgen half a pinch, and a nip half a smidgen? I'm guessing either Fannie Farmer or an early measuring spoon manufacturer, but does anyone know different?

Back in the kitchen the thread and dye liquor have been united. I'll let you know how I get on! And meanwhile ... know any dialect names for dandelions? They were 'piss-a-beds' in Somerset where I grew up, or 'one o'clocks'.

* Dandelion roots are reputed to yield a magenta dye, but I've yet to hear of a dyer who has achieved anything more exciting than a mucky fawn.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Follow the links below to subscribe to free updates via ...
Feedly Bloglovin Email

Never miss a post again.
Google Reader users, don't forget to transfer your subscription before July 1st.

You can also now join us on Ravelry!

54 The Shetland shawl that wasn't

Knitting. Okay, so the other day, when I said I'd cast on a Shetland Triangle .. I didn't get very far. In fact I got just far enough to fall out majorly with the yarn I'd chosen. I prefer yarns that can be tugged gently without breaking ... this isn't that yarn! Bottom line, it's spun from fibres with a short staple length - merino lambswool and cotton - hence its tensile strength is on the low side. So, not the optimum yarn for lace ... ever tried knitting a nup* without tugging? But all I did was cast on - kinda' necessary, whatever I'm making - and the darn stuff broke twice! Truly, I'm loath to diss something I know others love, but Holst Garn's 'Coast' clearly needs careful handling!

Nature. Also rather fragile are the dried hydrangea heads I've been admiring all winter. This one's tucked into a tiny old perfume bottle, along with a cluster or two of alder cones. It's lost all its colour now and is starting to crumble, and I wanted to photograph it before it disintegrated any further. To archive its fading beauty ... Sabi, 'the bloom of time' **. Of course the fact that I've reduced it to pixels rather undermines the exercise, I need an actual print.

Reading. Dear Sweet Home, which is at first glance a Japanese book about storage solutions - wooden boxes, linen bags, glass jars - but which, to borrow from Leonard Koren, is also about 'materiality, pared down to essence, with the poetry intact' ... Wabi-sabi again, and inspiration for my studio, which is almost ready for the big reveal ! When I get a moment I'll scan some of the page spreads for you. And Ron McMillan's Between Weathers: Travels in 21st Century Shetland, which I mentioned previously. It ties in with another Japanese aesthetic concept, Ma, a consciousness of place.

And that's me, disappointed by yarn, delighted by decay, and distracted by Japanese aesthetics. What's happening with you just now? Do tell!

Linking with Lou's Nature in the Home, and Ginny's Yarn Along.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
* A traditional textural element of Estonian Lace knitting, akin to an elongated bobble.

** As in the Japanese Wabi-sabi.
♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Follow the links below to subscribe to free updates via ...
Feedly Bloglovin Email

Never miss a post again.
Google Reader users, don't forget to transfer your subscription before July 1st.

You can also now join us on Ravelry!

48 Hung with bloom along the bough *

Did you know that the cherry tree is a relative of the rose? Every spring this red leaved beauty reminds me of that. Used in the dye pot its bark should give the same antique pink you see in the flowers. But the tree's not ours. It grows by the farm gate and its bark will be hard to come by ... 'stone fruit hates the knife' and cherry trees are rarely pruned. Thankfully when it is tidied up the task will fall to the Farmer Boy, who seems to have abandoned all thoughts of returning to university, and who is becoming well accustomed to hauling home bags of vegetation for his colour-mad mother. Just yesterday he pitched up with a sack of carrot tops*!

My great-grandpa was a farmer-boy too, but only in his later years, he'd been a typesetter when younger. He died when I was three and is in memory no more than the scent of wool, soil and the tobacco he smoked in his cherrywood pipe. My mother still has that pipe, and a grainy old photograph of him smoking it. He looks like my son, or rather my son looks like him. Can a penchant for digging be inherited do you think? And how is it that our preferences and our passions can seem to echo down the generations? I wonder if there's a crazy-knitter great-grandkid in my future somewhere!

Do you see such patterns in your own family or is it just mine?

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
You've probably noticed the changes I made to my post footer recently ... I added this reminder: "Google Reader users, don't forget to transfer your subscription before July 1st." And I've received a fair few requests for clarification, all worded similarly to June's: "I don't understand what's happening ... what do I need to do to stay in the loop?"

The simple answer is that you don't need to do anything unless you do use Google Reader, which is being 'retired'. And if you do use it, you don't need to do anything too complicated, just switch to an alternative - I'd recommend Bloglovin if you want something simple - and import the feeds of all the blogs you've been following to it - there's a handy 'Import' button on the Bloglovin site. Of course Bloglovin isn't your only option - Feedly's another, as is Bloglines.

If you're using the Reading List within the Blogger dashboard, don't worry, it's not going anywhere and the blogs you've followed using Google's Friend Connect will still be listed there. And the other options for keeping abreast of bloggy goings on will also be unaffected ... Twitter, Facebook, Ravelry - notifications of new knitsofacto posts are sent to all three - email subscriptions, even the humble blog roll, all will be just as before (although not HelloCotton, which closed last month). Truth is it's not blog readers but blog writers who are most likely to be affected by the change ... those readers who don't switch may well stop reading altogether come July. Don't be one of them, please, I'd miss you!

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
* "Lovliest of trees, the cherry now is hung with bloom along the bow." A.E. Housman

** Fresh carrot tops will give bright greeny-yellows on alum mordanted wool and silk ... guess who didn't have any alum mordanted silk or wool to hand, or for that matter any alum. A lesson learned!

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Follow the links below to subscribe to free updates via ...
Feedly Bloglovin Email

Never miss a post again.
Google Reader users, don't forget to transfer your subscription before July 1st.

You can also now join us on Ravelry!