Printing with Natural Dyes

I want to bring you a post from an interesting textile blog I found.  It's aimed at textile students throughout the world and there is a lot of industry information on it, but came across an interesting post about printing with natural dyes.  It's not very detailed, but it will give you enough information for you to work out how to do it!  My Textile Notes is the name of the blog and has lots of interesting information.

Any of the Pure Tinctoria natural mordants are full of tannins, oak gall (on the left) and cutch are the usual ones to use and myrobalan for the mordant printing are all available on the Pure Tinctoria website.

Thickeners such as Agar Agar and Gum Tragacanth are natural and easily obtained on the high street.

Let use know if you have had a go at natural printing or if you are planning to!  We'd love to see your results.

Mordanting Cellulose Fibres

I was reading Deb Bamfords blog, A History of Colour, today and her post was about mordanting cellulose fibres. This prompted me write about some mordanting I did earlier this year with my friend Lorraine.

Those of you who visit Pure Tinctoria at Woolfest and Wonderwool Wales will know Lorraine as my very able helper. I wanted to reward Lorraine for all the help she gives me at these events and won't take a penny in recompense. Knowing she likes makeing quilts, last year I gave her a dyeing kit and cotton fabric for her birthday, and we got together to do the mordanting.

Now, I'm a passionate advocate for wool, British in particular, so I had to get out all my books to check how to do the mordanting properly! I knew I could do it in a one stage process, using aluminium acetate, but Lorraine wanted to do it "traditionally" with the everything in her "kit". So we opted to follow the alum, tannin, alum process. The tannin component was Amber-M (Oak Gall).

I was really impressed with the fabulous colours we got. They are so rich.

This image is of the colours before Lorraine pressed the fabric, but even then they are really beautiful. From Left to Right they are:
Ganges (Dhak), Amazon (Annatto), Rhine-M (Red Lac) and Rhine-S (Purple Lac).