KIMBOKO said:
Yo Toddy
The only digital picture I have is of me in my white Capote I hate the colour and won't wear it for real until I've toned it down. As I only spent £1 for the blanket at a charity shop I'm not going to spent £10 on bought dyes to tone down the colour. Keeping it simple please can you advise on how to dye it with nettles.
Hmmm, it's fair bit of work, maybe a tenner isn't so bad
However, here goes.
To get dye to afix evenly you have to prepare the material you want dyed. Firstly removing *all* grease and oil and then it's usually more sucessful to pre-mordant the fibres. Basically a mordant will leave the fabric receptive to picking up the dye colour.
Don't fuss about special wool soaps and the like, cheap generic supermarket shampoo works fine; it's meant for hair, wool is hair. Ammonia will work really well at degreasing (that's what the stale urine was really used for!)
Mordants can be troublesome. They are all, without exception, toxic. Used carefully and in moderation they ought to cause no problems, but if I find someone using tin or chrome just to get a brighter colour I will come and be very nasty to them
The usual ones acceptable in the uk are alum, iron and copper.
Alum is used in water treatment so the sewerage systems are set up to deal with it, copper is used in water pipes and again, in moderation, is processed without destroying the rivers. Iron is used by most females in the land at some point or other and to quote a sewage engineer (yes, I did go and ask about these), "You lot excete most of it, so we've gotten used to treating the excess". He almost had hysterics when I mentioned chrome and tin, so we won't go there, will we?
You need to weigh your jacket, and if you let me know I'll send you sufficient mordant for it, or if you'd prefer advise weights and where to obtain supplies. Much less mordant than is usually advised is needed for dyeing. Most of the how much to use advice comes from companies selling the stuff so it's in their interests to advise *lots* when it's not really necessary. Originally mordants were obtained from local minerals and plants. The plants that supply alum are bog mosses and it's definitely not recommended to collect them now. Iron and copper ore or iron pan water are a real pain to process, though steel wool and vinegar will give iron mordant and copper pipe in ammonia will give the copper one.
Nettles: Lots! You need as many leaves as will fit into the largest pot you have, pour over boiling water and simmer gently for maybe half an hour....strain it and you should have a strong green-brown liquor. This is your dye. If it's not strong enough you'll get a very soft sunbleached khaki green colour on your wool, but you can always boil up some more dye and steep the jacket again. The dye can be diluted down to create a sufficient volume of liquid for the fabric to move freely in the dyebath.
If you don't move the fabric gently around in the dye it'll create a very patchy looking finish (camouflage??)
The only problem I can see is that some wool felts very easily, which is why I'd recommend dyeing the fabric before the garment is made up, at least that way you can make it big enough instead of worrying about shrinkage. However, if you make sure to raise and lower the temperature of the wool slowly, no thermal shocks, and don't agitate it in the water, just gently move it about it ought to be fine.
How long? Ah well, if you raise the temperature of a reaction by 10oC you cut the time needed for the reaction in half, but if you think about it, that means that time will work as well as heat, so just leave it in until it's a colour you like or finally run out of patience
Hope this helps, if not give me a phone, or send a pm and I'll see what I can do,
Cheers,
Toddy
