Dyeing Wool and Silk with Fresh Madder Roots

Three years ago, I planted madder seeds. Lately, the new green shoots of 2016 came up through the earth, persuading me it was near enough Spring to start to dig.
Three years ago, I also started this blog. Waiting for the madder plants to grow big enough roots to harvest for red dye has only taken patience, the blog has been a great deal of work in pursuit of more nebulous ends. This third anniversary has me pondering whether all that time blogging has   

been well spent.  What does it mean to have 150,000 page views?  I might say oh, I just enjoy the writing process and benefit from keeping records, but I'd certainly be gutted if people stopped reading, so thanks very much everyone for that. Appreciation in the virtual world has affected real life choices, most notably, last summer, dropping the day job in favour of hand spinning and plant dyes.  Discovering all these roots under the madder plants warmed my heart with gladness and it's just as well I feel such personal satisfaction, since as a small time sole trader, I have barely managed to cover my craft material costs through hundreds and hundreds of hours of work.  I thought I understood in advance that money was not what 

this new life was about, but I was skilled and senior in my old job and the first six months of early retirement provided some difficult reality checks. I'm slowly getting my head around salvaging some self worth while doing what I want for no-one but myself and not being terribly good at it.  Nor efficiently organised. The morning is half gone, here I am in my pyjamas making a second cup of coffee and emptying the ashtray, digressing despite half a dozen things on the day's to do list and madder root dye to write about.
So, with three plants divided and replanted, the precious roots were washed and picked over.  I've heard that dark bark on the thicker roots gives brown tones to the dye, so I spent an age picking and rubbing it 

off before chopping them up.  Half a bucket full of fresh roots shrunk down to half a bowl full of bits, weighing just over 500g.  Jenny Dean's Wild Colour book says the orange shades can be cleared by pouring boiling water on the roots and leaving it for two minutes, twice.  The drained fluid looked tawny brown.  Teresinha's Wild Colours website advises using a food processor  to liquidise the roots in water, a handful at a time.

Mine did not break down well, the result was more minestrone than mash.  I dissolved a teaspoon of calcium carbonate in hot water, stirred it in and checked the pH.  Slightly acid, so in went enough dissolved soda ash to get the pH up to 8.  Various sources agree that the best reds are obtained by gentle heat over the course of days.  I left the main pot, the bowl of hot rinse water and a pan of boiled bark scrapings on the underfloor heating in the bathroom for 24 hours before adding alum mordanted merino roving, silk hankies and a silk scarf.  Each day, I pulled another length of the silk scarf up from the main dye bath and took out a piece of merino.

The total weight of these fibres was about 100g to the 500g fresh roots.  From the top left, merino in the hot root rinse water went strongly scarlet red, so there was plenty of red dye loosed by that brief boiling water soak, on top of stripping out the orange tones. The dye from the bark scrapings alone came out browner, but still a decent scarlet-ish red, I shan't fret too much about cleaning older roots next time.  On the bottom row, wool in the main bath was a purer red, deepening in colour over five days, the last portion becoming a proper blood red.  The silk hankies were amazingly hard to wet, all the thicker parts stayed white, taking up no dye during over a week's immersion. I've since been told by an expert that silk hankies need a fortnight to presoak before dyeing.  The silk scarf came out with glorious gradations of madder red, according to how long each part was left to soak in the madder bath.

Next, I shall be writing about a week spent teasing more colours out of madder root afterbaths.
Time is the greatest luxury.  I spend a lot of mine walking the dog, putting together a blog post, spinning, dyeing or just having a fag and staring into space.  

On reflection, this seems to me a very good life.