Last weekend, Tod ran a fancy extension cord to the shed for me and now I have electricity. I can run the IH cooker and boil up color baths! So the first thing I did with my new electricity was to play with the cedar cones I collected a couple weeks ago.
The results were interesting and also disappointing.
Interesting because the color was very different between the first and second boils. The first boil – 30 minutes – released a golden color. The second boil of the cones with twice as much water + 1/4 tsp of baking soda as a modifier, yielded a deep brown.
I know that with certain dyestuffs, a second boil yields a different color, but I don’t understand why. Something to research.
I decided to use the dye to color some cloth. I had a scrap of sarashi gauze that I had mordanted with alum and a bit of unbleached muslin that I put some yogurt onto as a protein binder the day before.
Disappointingly , neither came out very dark, but they definitely did turn a brownish-pink. I only gave them one 20 minute dip in the dye. I probably should have rinsed them and re-dyed them a couple of times to deepen the color but I was running out of daylight.
I used the rest of the cedar dye bath to make paper. That was also interesting. I used random scraps of newspaper and Amazon’s packing paper so the pulp slurry had a beige/grey tone to start. The cedar brown liquid shifted the color warmer. I threw in one of the cooked cones, too, for speckled texture.
The fun of doing this is not the results, it’s the process and learning and all the adjunct bits that come along with the experimentation. Even in the cold with chilly fingers, I had a lot of fun in the shed.
Before long I’m going to need a place to store all the things I make. Might have to build another shed. 😉
