Exploring plant dyes, leaf imprints and stitching with Kirsten Ingemar.

 

If you ever get the chance to do a workshop with Kirsten Ingemar, grab it!  Born in Denmark but living in Australia for over 20 years, she resides in northern NSW, and works as a textile artist, but also is generous enough to share her skills in workshops.  She is your ideal teacher: relaxed, knowledgeable, encouraging individual contribution, experiment and expression, supportive, warm and with a great sense of humour.  The five days that I spent learning from her were organised by Fibre Arts Australia and held in Ballarat, but you can find  out more about her and her work on www.kirsteningemar.com

Dyeing fabrics with plants:

I was with a lovely group of fellow students.  We all helped each other, supported each other and shared resources.  First, we braved the bracing chill and damp to gather leaves from the grounds of the school.  Pooling our resources, we discovered that we had enough for about 16 sample pots, so we stripped the leaves from branches and stems, and ripping and crushing them, filled the pots between 1/3 to 1/2 full. We had another pot with bark from a eucalypt tree of which none of us were quite sure of the name,  and a last pot with some red cabbage.

Next, we covered the leaves with water and set them to boil and learned about the unpredictable world of dyeing with plants. 

We learned that generally, the leaves of a plant are used, but bark, wood, seed pods, pips,  lichen, roots and fruit can dye fabric.  Plus, the colour can vary depending on the part of the plant used, the season that the parts are harvested in, the conditions that the plant is grown in, the water used and the fabric being used.  Kirsten said that once you have dyed for a while, you get to judge which leaves will be suitable by the feel and look of them.  Oiliness tends to be a good indicator.  However, the best method to ascertain the dye potential of a plant is making a sample pot, like we were doing.

We were told that all new fabric should be prewashed, to remove any sizing that might prevent the dye from being absorbed.  Silk and wool absorb dye best, but plant based fabrics like cotton, bamboo, hemp and linen generally need to be treated with something to encourage the dye to remain attached to the fabric.

We also learned that some plants are self- mordanting, but that generally, to create a colour from a plant that dyes a fabric fast, one has to add a mordant.  This mordant affects the colour that comes out of the plant.  The three main mordants are alum (which can be added by using an aluminium pot, putting orris root in the pot, or by using alum powder, and tends to give a brighter or yellower colour), copper ( which can be added by putting a piece of copper in the pot, or using copper powder, and tends to give a green or brown colour), or iron (which can be added by putting something iron- a rusty nail or a horseshoe for example- in the pot, or using iron powder, and gives a greyer or black colour).  The different effects on the colour mean that it is very important not to cross contaminate the pots.  Once you put the fabric in the pot, the longer the fabric simmers, the stronger the colour.  Also, if you can leave the fabric in a cooling pot overnight, the colour is likely to be stronger.

Once the water boiled, Kirsten checked the liquid in each pot.  If there was a definite colour to the water, she stirred a mordant into it, using the existant colour to decide which mordant to use, and using 1/2 to 1 dessertspoon of mordant depending on the strength of the existing colour.  The lilly pilly leaves did not colour the water, so we discarded them, but all the other plants were successful. Once this  was done, we put our sample pieces of wool or silk in the pots and simmered the pots for about 3/4 hour.  When we removed the fabrics, we recorded the results using a description of the plant when we didn't know the official name.  The colours ranged from shades of yellow to shades of green to shades of brown to shades of grey. 

 The most noteable colours were:
blue for red cabbage with copper 
mauve for red cabbage with alum
olive green for rosemary with copper
brown for echeum  and copper
yellow for Cootamundra Wattle/Acacia Baileyanna and alum
brown for silky oak/ Grevillia Robusta and copper
creepy tan for oak and alum
rusty brown from lemon scented gum and copper
green from acacia cognata and copper
gold from Eucalyptus Cineria and alum
dark green for Dyer's chamomile and copper
brown for Red flowering gum and copper

The second skill we learned was how to treat the plant based fabrics so that the dye was fast.  Soaking fabric in soy milk or almond milk for about half an hour, then squeezing out the fabric, and hanging it out to dry before dyeing it encourages fastness.

Leaf imprints:

The next skill we learned was making a dye pot for leaf imprinting. Kirsten combined the contents of the three eucalyptus dye pots (one of which contained iron and two of which contained copper) and added about 1/2 dessertspoon of iron.  This iron is needed to bring definition to the outlines of the leaves.  The copper is optional, but it brought out streaks of green and travels faster. The mixture was brought to the boil.

Kirsten got us to each make a sampler.  We had 2 squares of marine ply wood, but decking and perspex are equally good.  Firstly, she put 2 pieces of flanelette on the wood to prevent the wood staining the silk fabric.  Next, plant pieces were placed between two layers or silk ( the backs and fronts of leaves have very different patterns so bear this in mind).

After that, two more pieces of cotton were placed on top to stop the plants from seeping into the next pieces of silk. 

We kept doing this until the last person, then placed the second piece of wood on the top and clamped the sandwich bundle as tight as possible, to ensure that the leaves were defined, but the colour didn't saturate the fabric. 

Next, strong string was used to tie the sandwhich tightly together.  Once the bundle was secured, the clamps were removed and the bundle was ready to put in the boiling pot.

After boiling, for at least an hour,

 the bundles were opened and we discovered the colours coming out of the leaves and the leaf outlines.  Sheer magic.

We also learned that if we painted one side of  a leaf with beaten egg, it would encourage the cellulose fabrics to absorb the imprint of the leaf.

Once we learned the techniques, we tried the techniques ourselves.  If we didn't mind the seepage from the wood or the previous layer of plants, we didn't use the cotton buffer. 

Sometimes, we used the soaked cotton, sometimes wool and sometimes silk.  We experimented with lots of plants and plant parts, like rose-hip segments, buds, stems.

 

 Sometimes we mixed speciments,

and sometimes we used only a single specimen.

Sometimes we used pieces of wood, sometimes, we wrapped fabric around branches, bark, copper pipes, poles or pipes, securing them tightly with string.  We loved the way the wood often seeped into the fabric.  Sometimes, the wood imprints were as good as the leaf imprints. 

Kirsten also showed us how a weaker iron solution meant a paler background colour and a more defined plant imprint, but it also meant the bundle needed to be left in the pot for longer.

We learned to rinse the fabric after it had dried to get rid of the black iron sludge.  We also learned that the colour changed as it dried.  We also were told that we needed to wash the fabric with a gentle soap and warm water to remove all the iron, which can degrade the fsabric if left after a time.

I can't wait to try out the techniques at home.  Hopefully, my results will be as good as Kirsten's after 20 years of experiment!

Once we had our fabrics, we decided which pieces were works of art in themselves, and began, in the small amount of time left, to use others to create new pieces of art, using stitch and collage.

  I'll keep you up to date with what I do with my fabrics in future blogs.