Dyeing Fletchings

[stovie]

When I get my goose primaries in the new year,I could always leave them white. But that would be boring...

So... Any ideas as to what technique/substances I should use to colour them? Preferably traditional, as it is all too easy to aquire some modern dyes...

Thanks

 

[gaz_miggy]

buy some die or try something like sand stown mixed with water no idea if it will work but its an idea or somthing along thows lines

 

[Nod]

......but white is so much easier to find again in the green stuff. Which is normally where mine end up, hence all mine are all white

I've never thought about how they dye them. I'll ask our fletcher if he has any handy hints. Won't see him till next week though.

What about blood, and give them a red tinge. Not sure where you'd go for a pint of blood though.
Beetroot juice maybe. I'm trying to think about all the stuff that's a pain to get out of my shirts.

 

[stovie]

......but white is so much easier to find again in the green stuff. Which is normally where mine end up, hence all mine are all white

I've never thought about how they dye them. I'll ask our fletcher if he has any handy hints. Won't see him till next week though.

What about blood, and give them a red tinge. Not sure where you'd go for a pint of blood though.
Beetroot juice maybe. I'm trying to think about all the stuff that's a pain to get out of my shirts.

I paint the ends of the shafts lurid colours to find them

Beetroot juice is a thought...

Cheers. Be interested to hear what your mate has to say :You_Rock_

 

[redcollective]

Here's a turorial I dug up on the web for a rich black dye:

http://www.primitiveways.com/black_dye.html

 

[Toddy]

Feathers are basically hair so anything that will work on wool will work on the feathers.

Madder root....red, rust, peach colours, if you add iron to the dyebath you'll get maroon colours.

Onion skins = bright yellow , though it will fade fairly quickly to a soft butter yellow. Add alum to help fix the colour and add bicarbonate of soda to brighten it. Weld or Golden Rod will also give good yellows quite easily.

Woad....will give good blues, stinks to high heaven though and is a bit of a bother to get it right, but really worthwhile colours.

Green can be really easily done if you dissolve some copper in ammonia...this liquid is TOXIC and must be handled with care.....

Dye take up will be greatly influenced by how greasy the feathers are, I suggest you wash them first in either Fairy liquid or shampoo (hey, it's meant for hair )
If you then mordant them the dye will really fix to the feathers.
About 70% of British dyestuffs will give yellow, if you add iron, it will sadden the colour and give it green tinges, if you add copper it will give brighter green shades or deepen reds and rust dyes.
The other mordants commonly talked about are Chrome and Tin......both are horrendously pollutant of water systems, please don't use them, the colours you can get without poisoning our environment are really good anyway.
If you'd like some of the dyestuffs I've mentioned PM me.
Cheers,
Toddy

 

[stovie]

Redcollective, thanks for the link.

Toddy, a mine of information. Very useful. Thank you

:You_Rock_

 

[Toddy]

Feathers are basically hair so anything that will work on wool will work on the feathers.

Natural, indigenous dyes.

Please see
http://www.seamstimeless.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
for the colour wheels from last year. There ought to have been more rusts and browns but for some reason I didn't do many of them last year.

Cheers,
Toddy

 

[stovie]

Very impressive, Toddy.

How do you go about standardising reproducibility ...What I mean is, can you get the colour pretty much the same from batch to batch.

In particular what do you use for your blues (silly me that'd be the woad) So to get it darker do you steep it longer??...A blue cock fletch would be cool

 

[Toddy]

Thank you.

If I really need to repeat a shade or tone accurately then I will dye washed fleece as closely as I can get, but card it with other samplings until I get the colour I want. Having done that, then I'll spin the wool. It's not so easy on a piece of cloth or ready spun hanks, but it can be done, it's just practice and an eye for detail that's needed.

Blue dye is a funny one; we think of woad and indigo, but it can be obtained from fungi too and...sometimes.....from roses Deep red roses if allowed to ferment will give off a good rich maroon colour but when wool is steeped in the liquor it comes out pale blue The fungal dye is well used in Scandinavian countries but appears to be rare here. I have twice obtained a blue from elderberries. I used copper mordanted wool that was soaked in fermented elderberry juice. It seems to be something to do with a fungus again because each time that it worked, the dyebath had grown a beautiful violet blue fungal skin.The easiest way to dye blue is to use indigo, but boy it stinks! To get a deeper blue colour I re-dip the wool/cloth in the dyebath until it's the shade I want.
Feathers are fairly small, we ought to be able to manage a dyebath for them at one of the meet ups; there are certainly a lot of archers on the forum though

Cheers,
Toddy

 

[stovie]

Cheers Toddy. Practical as ever. Is indigo easily obtained? And more to the point, is it relatively inexpensive!!!?

 

[Toddy]

Cheers Toddy. Practical as ever. Is indigo easily obtained? And more to the point, is it relatively inexpensive!!!?

Depends on who you know
It's more of a footer than anything, but it's quite dramatic
I usually just buy mine from George Weil, Ithink it's all under Fibrecrafts now though,

http://www.fibrecrafts.com/

Thing is you need the de-oxygenators too to make indigo work, woad is fermented until it rots anaerobically.....that's why it smells *so* bad when dyeing.
Fibrecrafts sell a kit with everything you need with good clear instructions too.
Only the blue at 10 o'clock on the second hoop down
http://www.seamstimeless.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
came from woad, all of the other blues, above and below 10 are berries or rose dyes.
Indigo *stays* blue, mine soften out over a couple of years to lavender greys. The fungal ones are suppose to last really well.

pm if you get stuck I'm going to have a go at some feathers....I think there are a couple of geese hanging on a neighbours washing line, I'll scrounge some feathers. Normally the wings are only used to train the dogs anyway

Cheers,
Toddy

 

[stovie]

Depends on who you know
It's more of a footer than anything, but it's quite dramatic .......

pm if you get stuck I'm going to have a go at some feathers....I think there are a couple of geese hanging on a neighbours washing line, I'll scrounge some feathers. Normally the wings are only used to train the dogs anyway

Cheers,
Toddy

Thanks Toddy.

Okay, there is a term I'm not clear on, "Footer"...what exactly do you mean by that...Is it the raw material without the mordant???

As for geese hanging on a washing line, now there's an image....

 

[Toddy]

Thanks Toddy.

Okay, there is a term I'm not clear on, "Footer"...what exactly do you mean by that...Is it the raw material without the mordant???

As for geese hanging on a washing line, now there's an image....

Well we don't do posh round here, no ice houses or game rooms, you know Besides, it's d*mned cold hanging around out there just now.

oops, sorry. A footer is just something that's a fussy botherersome fiddly thing or process.
In this case you have to make up the indigo solution, from stuff that just doesn't want to dissolve, you have to make up the thixolite, the de-oxygenating solution, the two have to be combined, they have to be mixed without introducing oxygen, they have to be kept within a certain temperature range and in sealed jars, the solution needs frequent adjusting.....and so on. The colours are stunning though

Cheers,
Toddy

 

[Grooveski]

They're amazing Toddy. What a range.

Are any of the yellows there from Boletus? We gathered a load last year and were going to try making dye but we, erm, got peckish .

Would there be any chance of numbering the colours and listing the sources at some point? It'd make an awesome resource. I could lend a hand numbering the photos and making it all into a PDF if you like.

 

[Toddy]

They're amazing Toddy. What a range.

Are any of the yellows there from Boletus? We gathered a load last year and were going to try making dye but we, erm, got peckish .

Would there be any chance of numbering the colours and listing the sources at some point? It'd make an awesome resource. I could lend a hand numbering the photos and making it all into a PDF if you like.

Thank you, it wasn't a bad year for dyes
There's very little fungus in that lot to be honest, fomes is about it. Boletus is better munched and I've never found enough in one gathering to want to dye too.
Thanks for the offer though, much appreciated. These were just some photos I had to hand that showed the range, I usually record my individual shade cards but I only use that website to host a few photos and the shade card ones number into the hundreds
I need to have a think about a way to simplify things if we're going to leave them up.

Cheers,
Toddy

 

[Grooveski]

Yeah, it's hard to justify using edibles, especialy tasty ones, the dye idea only lasted a couple of hours .

This weekend's project is photographing lichens(among other things) out at Scotties to get an idea of the spread and quantities.

One of the deciding factors in the land becoming an SAC was the number of species of lichens(and mosses, ferns etc).
I know some of them can be used for dyes but don't know one from another. Once we have a pile of photos to help ID them we'll work out which ones are protected and maybe have a play with some of the others.
I'll get in touch if we find an abundance of anything useful.

 

[PatrickM]

The colours you've created are amazing Toddy, a fantastic natural Pallete. Superb work.

 

[C_Claycomb]

I would be hesitant to do anything to reduce the visibility of my flights. I used to shoot with natural barred turkey feathers, provided by a friend in the US. Not bad for indoors, but when roving they were not only hard to see if I missed, but I seemed to miss more. I read something by G. Fred Asbell in his book on instinctive shooting where he mentioned finding it much easier to shoot accurately with easily visible fletches. For roving I would have to agree, I reckon I got more benifit from my practice when I could see the arrow, clearly, in flight.

 

[stovie]

Thats a fair comment Chris. I was only ever planning to dye the cock fletch...more out of tradition than the practicality of locating my cock!!!!