To Scour or not to Scour? A Galling question....

2018 was off to a good start as soon as I unloaded my van in preparation for the Sturt Summer School. I had a full class of students eager to learn the basics of natural dyeing and then to progress to mordant printing.

One of the most important aspects of all dyeing is the preparation of the cloth beforehand.  All too often we are in such a hurry, we misinterpret 'scouring' to mean "a quick rinse or wash in the washing machine".  Whilst any preparation has to be better than nothing on store-bought fabric, failure to take the time to ensure the fabric is free from grease, oils, dirt and sizing will result in patchy and uneven dyeing, leading to disappointment and waste of time and materials.

Below is a photo of already-whiter-than-white PFP (Prepared for Printing) linen tea-towels that I buy to print on with pigments. The water-based printing emulsion is mixed with concentrated fabric pigments which are screen-printed with a design. Once perfectly dry, the tea-towels are heat-set to bond the resin-based print-paste to the fabric.  It will only ever sit on the surface of the fabric, not inside the fibres as in dyeing.

However, in order to dye these tea-towels (in either natural or synthetic dyes) they must be scoured thoroughly first.  I figured not much would happen but at least I was doing a practical demonstration of the scouring process to the students, most of whom were beginners. 

Was I wrong!! The photo below shows the water that the 5 teatowels were scoured in - can you believe the colour of it - almost looks like a dye itself!!! After this photo was taken I started the process again and scoured the tea-towels a second time. The second lot of scouring water was paler than the first, but not entirely clean.  Given that each scouring should take around 2 hours, we rinsed them and went onto Galling the linen in a Gall Nut soak before we could mordant them the following day. This demonstration clearly shows that whilst the linen tea-towels may be PFP, they are not PFD (Prepared for Dyeing). This is an important distinction if you are buying fabric from a wholesaler to dye with.

Scouring water from the white linen tea-towels

Another important process in fibre preparation for immerse dyeing that is commonly omitted for cotton is the galling or tanning of the fabric or fibre before dyeing. This process literally 'tans' the cloth so that the mordant will attach more readily to the fibre, which in turn attracts the dye. I must admit that I have been a culprit in the past, but Joy Boutrup and Catharine Ellis converted me to galling  cotton when I attended a two week intensive course with them back in 2013. Galling can be done with a number of different plants but I prefer to use the Gall Nut method as it is fairly colourless.

I set up several experiments using store-bought tabby weave cotton fabric;  fabric that had been untreated and unwashed; fabric that had been unwashed, unscoured but mordanted in alum;  fabric that had been scoured and mordanted in alum; fabric that had been scoured and mordanted in Symplocos; and fabric that had been scoured, tanned in Gall Nut and then mordanted in Symplocos. We then dyed the pieces of fabric in a Weld extract dyebath for one hour and observed the differences between them once the samples had been washed, dried and ironed. 

The richest colour and most evenly dyed sample was, not surprisingly, the one that had been scoured, tanned and mordanted in Symplocos.  About one shade behind were the scoured and mordanted samples and the cloth that had been neither washed, scoured nor mordanted was the worst dyed sample of the lot. The differences were easily seen by eye, however did not really show up on camera, hence no photos.

In theory we should also have done a test that included a step with Turkey Red oil for the cotton, but in a 4-day workshop this was unfortunately one step too many!

In my next post I will show some examples of what the student's achieved in the four days, or if you are on Instagram I have posted a few of them @julierydertextiles.

Sturt Summer School

No sooner had I finished digesting the Christmas pudding and getting over the champagne from New Year's Eve, it was time to hit the road again and head down to teach a Printing with Mordants and natural dyes workshop at Sturt Summer School.

The grounds of Frencham Girl's School where workshops are held.

This was a similar workshop to what I taught in Geelong last year, with a few plusses and minuses along the way! I love teaching at Sturt because it is only a couple of hours away from Canberra and this means I can pack my car to the brim with everything I need...and more! The campus is very handy to shops, good coffees, the Sturt Gallery and massages and yoga for those who need extra nurturing.  Mark, Tracey and Slavica have got everything super-organised so there is nothing to do but teach, eat and sleep! Bliss.
We had a few minor hiccups with one of our recipes early on in the week, so that set me back a bit trying to figure out what could have gone wrong....as it turned out it wasn't anything I had miscalculated but perhaps a recipe which needs a little more investigation.  In the end it all worked out and we managed to get some great results with our mordant printing.
One of the great successes was our totally natural indigo dyebath, which we used all week, heating it  and wrapping it up overnight to keep warm.  In Geelong we had the added benefit of a heater in the room, so at Sturt I filled up a bin with hot water and placed the vat in it overnight with lots of insulation to keep it happy :}

Some student work plus stool by local furniture maker

The trouble with making a beautiful indigo vat....what to do with it when you've finished the workshop? After my Turor's talk, a local furniture-maker who studied at Sturt and COFA showed me some of her furniture and bowls that she is selectively dipping into indigo...different coloured woods dye different shades of blue depending on their tannin content.  Above is an example including some student work on the table.  As usual, I was so engrossed in everything I forgot to take more photos during the workshop and at our final display...note to self....
For more information on upcoming workshops please visit the events page on my website.

Best wishes for the New Year

Taking this opportunity to wish all of my readers a very happy, creative and peaceful New Year as 2014 comes to a close. I have been having a lovely time catching up with family and friends in Victoria over Christmas.  I also managed to see the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition at the NGV, which was amazing, so if you get the chance to see it do so, because it changes the whole way we think about the presentation of fashion and garments in the museum context. Below are a few details of the haute couture costumes.

Feathers

Crocodile skin

Fully beaded

Crocodile scales on hosiery

Meticulous attention to detail.

However,  its back to work at the end of the week.  I will be teaching a workshop at the Sturt Summer School including a free public talk on Thursday 8th January from 5-5.30pm.
I will be posting some images from the week at Sturt next week so until then, best wishes for 2015.
julie

Natural Dyes and Mordant Printing at Sturt

Sturt have just released their  Summer School 2015 workshop information and I will be teaching Natural Dyes and Mordant Printing on Fabric.  Places are filling fast so if you are interested now is the time to enrol!.  I always have such a good time at the Sturt Summer School - everybody is super friendly, the tutors are the top of their field, the Sturt staff are fantastic and the weather is usually lovely. I seem to attract a great group of students and we all end up having a fun yet productive time. I hope to see some of my students return for another great week of printing and experimenting.

While I was in the UK I went to loads of museums and galleries and one of the most interesting I went to was the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.  I am including a few images of some very old block printed  textiles which have been done with mordants and natural dyes.

Indian textile from Indonesia (1400). Block printed cotton with resist and mordant-dyed red.

Indian cotton textile traded to Egypt, block printed, painted mordant and resist.

Colour+Print!

At the Sturt Summer School this year I taught a "Colour+Print" workshop that focused on the basics of mixing colour for printing onto textiles. 

One happy class!

Most of the participants were beginners although some had related experience in the areas of weaving, sewing, dyeing, graphic design and teaching art. Student learnt to mix their own colours from scratch, learning about colour theory and the technical aspects of the chemicals involved, including exploring the many different binders that could be used onto textiles to create different effects.  Once we got a hang of that, we had fun playing with carving blocks and using traditional blocks for block-printing as well as cutting stencils for screen-printing.

Kate's green hydrangea block-print

Elizabeth's vibrant block-printed cotton

Exploring both traditional and hand carved blocks

This was a fabulous collaboration with a professional outcome!

The cushions seen above are an example of how much work and effort the students put into a 5-day workshop.  The Japanese Maple block was carved by Jen, the design and construction was executed by Lee, and Marylou acted as colourist and stylist. Lee and Marylou also made matching aprons from their colour swatch experiments (seen in the background), tote bags, napkins, tea-towels and much, much more.  It was awesome to come into class each day and see what they had achieved.  In fact, the whole class was so enthusiastic that we received many many comments about the work produced during the public Saturday Open Studio.  Well done ladies! 

Oh....they also presented me with this fab tote bag, screen-printed and signed by each one of them, then sewn up in the dead of night by Lee...and filled with bottles of wine of course! One of the most enjoyable workshops I have taught.

My next workshop will be at the TAFTA Geelong Fibre Forum in late September - Experiments in Printing with Mordants. Great for those of you who have an interest in natural dyeing and want to expand into printing with mordants and natural dyes.