Soak ‘Em if you got ‘Em: Adventures in Mordant
Choosing and using mordants is a really broad topic, so I will be talking about it in chunks. In this segment, I’m talking specifically about the mordanting I did in preparation for dyeing silk and cotton with madder dye. For the sake of simplicity, let me start at the beginning. What is a mordant and why do we need it? The word mordant is related to the French word morder, “to bite.” A mordant is a substance that helps the pigment in the dye “bite” into the fiber and hold on. Dyeing fiber is a process of creating a molecular bond between fiber and pigment, and many natural dyes can’t make…
Watching it all go Scour
Fiber preparation is not one of the sexy parts of dyeing, but it’s a process that can improve your results significantly. It’s kind of like painting the walls in your house. You can skip the prep and go straight to the paint, but then you’ll probably spend the next two years noticing the hair and cobwebs you painted over, and finding little spots starting to peel. Like dyeing, doing a good job of prepping to paint is likely to take longer than the fun color part, but spending the extra time really does get you noticeably better results that last. So, I spent the last two days in my studio…
