Madder Project

We love Madder. It has an ancient history, and the colour red itself has many associations in so many cultures. It takes time and patience to produce good reds however, and is one of the more expensive dyes.
As part of the 'Real Colour Show' exhibition that we are taking part in, in October, we are working on a Madder project. We hope to try various old recipes, cold dyeing, controlled heat, experiment with mordanting and seeing what effects, if any, our three water sources have on the colour. We are not scientists however so this is a craft experiment, with controls as good as we can make them!
Our three water sources are the tap water here in our Talgarth studio, spring water from our land 3 miles down the road, and water from our watermill in Ceredigion. The latter will be water that leaches from the mill pond and filters a short way through the ground. We know that we can get great reds from our Talgarth tap water; the soil at the mill verges on acid so that may be interesting, and I don't know what to expect from the spring water.
Heat affects madder a great deal. Above about 60 C the reds start to turn brown, so we shall try 60, 80, and 100 C, and maybe slightly above 100C. The cold dyeing will also involve time - leaving 7 skeins to soak and removing them 0ne by one at intervals.
There's a huge amount one could do, but this has to be fitted in with all the other things there are to do round here - including keeping customers happy! - so we shall confine ourselves to using our Madder extract for the most part. If there's time, we'll try using some Madder roots, too. Experimenting like this also takes up rather a large amount of material.......