“Wake, butterfly” (Basho)

Yesterday I spent some hours dyeing 2 meters of unbleached cotton with the ground roots of Rubia cordifolia, or Indian madder. (There’s another madder, Rubia tinctorum, which is Turkish madder, or dyer’s madder.) I’ve dyed fabric for years with indigo (and once, woad) but I want to know more about colour and how to find it with powders, roots, leaves.

I’ve been reading books on natural dyes, probably 6 or 7 of them, and they kind of vary. There are ones written by true professionals, who advise on chemistry, weights, reactions, etc. and I soon realized I would quietly give up if I have to rely on them. The advice given by one expert contradicts the advice given in a different book. Other books, written by people like me (passionate amateurs…), are helpful, to a point. Some of them breezily advise you to simply experiment. And yes, that’s almost always my process but I found I needed to know a bit more to “simply experiment”.

The reading was helpful to me as I figured out what I needed. I dyed with indigo on a long slab of cedar bench near my vegetable garden and laid out the results on the grass by the bench

or else on the clothes line:

Indigo is simpler in that you don’t need to use a mordant (a pre-soak that prepares the fabric to accept the dye; different mordants result in different possibilities due to chemical processes). Some cultures consider indigo a sacred blue. (I’m a believer.) But the direction I want to move in, at least for a bit, means more equipment. I read the books carefully to determine what I would absolutely need and what I could do without. A heat source was important and because I wanted to do the work outside (the powders and so on require ventilation), I bought a cheap hotplate. I bought a long folding table (it can double as an extension to our outdoor deck table for large groups of people). At the thrift store, I bought a big stainless steel pot for $3. A colander. I have masks (COVID!) and I have disposable gloves. Lots of buckets — the recycling depot has a place where you can pick them up for free.

So yesterday: the rose madder. I’d prepared the fabric a few days ago, scouring it as required to eliminate sizing, starch, etc. Then I soaked it, over mild heat, in a mordant of potassium aluminum sulfate and soda ash. (I have a jar of homemade iron mordant which is simply old bolts and bits of rusted metal soaked in vinegar and water. Iron “saddens” most colours. I don’t know yet when I’ll want that effect.) I rinsed the fabric, dried it, and tied it with hemp string because I wanted a resist design, one I couldn’t manipulate or predict, but which would surprise me. All that was done and yesterday I weighed the madder powder, deciding on a formula that was sort of in the middle of the ranges advised in the books. Then I added it to water in the thrift pot on the hotplate and heated it to 60C. I put in the fabric, which wasn’t easy because the dye mixture was pretty sludgy, and I weighed it down with a big rock so all of it would be submerged, and I kept checking the temperature with my extra candy thermometer so keep it at 60C. After an hour, I removed the fabric and put it in a bucket of water for a preliminary rinse. Then I cut out the strings, marvelled at the beauty (because I didn’t really know what to expect, which is as it should be), and washed the length with mild soap and a bit of soda ash to fix the dye.

Is it what I hoped for? I didn’t have any hope beyond beauty. And yes, I think it’s beautiful. It’s the pinky-red cloth in the first photograph. The blue is a length of linen I dyed with indigo last fall, 5 meters of it, and I was delighted to discover that both of these fabrics are the same width. So I can cut off 2 meters of the blue and make a quilt, a full-cloth one (not patchwork or a pieced design). The blue actually has undertones of green, not really visible in the first photograph, but the third one shows it drying on the line, on the right-hand side. It was beige to begin with so the results were affected by that. The colour feels to me like my morning lake swims feel: blue green water swirling over me, a full-body immersion. Did I expect that blue-green, the swirls, the marbling? No, I didn’t. But I love it. And the pink? I just came across my husband eating a bowl of raspberries and cream…

Next? Marigold. Or cochineal. There’s so much to learn and I’ve waited so long. Maybe too long. A more supple mind could grasp the chemistry. Instead, I seem to moving in the direction of alchemy. It is what it is.

Wake, butterfly—

it’s late, we’ve miles

to go together.

Note: the poem is Basho’s, translated by Lucien Stryk.