ABOUT OUR DYES & MORDANTS

Our wools and threads are dyed with natural plant dyes, and contain no heavy metals such as chrome.  Some of the plants are local (eg, fern, coreopsis, cammomile), and others (eg, madder, indigo, cutch, brazilwood) are imported from Griffin Dyeworks and Textile Arts (hey, who else could we buy from?).  They are nice friendly people, and we highly recommend their products. 

A mordant is a substance which binds to the fibre and attaches the dye to it. Some dyes, such as indigo, need no mordant, but for most dyes a mordant is needed for the colour to take at all, or be anything but very pale.  Because the mordant is bound to the fibre, it does not come out with washing or soaking (or chewing, if you happen to be a baby ;-) .) If you somehow managed to drink the entire 8 litre pot of my standard Copper Sulphate mordant solution, you would have about a 50% chance of dying from copper poisoning. However, you would throw up violently after the first glassful, and so come to no harm. Incidentally, if you drink 8 litres of plain water in one go it will kill you -- it messes up your blood salt balance dreadfully.

Alum (Potassium Aluminium Sulphate) is one of the commonest of mordants.  It's non-toxic, and the used solution can be used as lawn fertiliser.  The other mordants I use are Copper Sulphate (see above),  tin (Stannous Chloride, don't drink this either), and iron (Ferrous Sulphate or rusty water), also non-toxic.  Alum brightens colours, copper brings out green, tin brightens and yellows, and iron darkens. I use tin very rarely.

The dye materials (flowers, leaves, bark, roots) are chopped up and simmered in water for an hour or two.  The dyebath is then strained, and the pre-mordanted fibre put in and simmered for a few minutes to a couple of hours, depending on the dye type and colour strength desired, or even left overnight in the cooling pot.  The fibre is taken out, cooled, rinsed thoroughly, and dried.  It may also get a rinse in an ammonia or white vinegar solution to bring out certain colours;  for example, brazilwood gives purples with ammonia and reds with vinegar. 

Because of variations in rainfall, temperature, and nutrition, colours  from natural dyes will vary from time to time.  The same clump of fishbone fern in my garden can give bright yellow in spring and pale green in autumn, for example.  It's often an adventure taking the fibre out and rinsing it -- you may get a surprise instead of the usual colour.  Unfortunately this means we cannot guarantee to match colours exactly, so please try to order enough wool or thread for your entire project at once.