Colours with Madder

A year ago now I did some experimenting with Madder, and so it's about time I posted something about it! I was interested to see what effect different water qualities would have. Whenever we are at a show, we get comments about the lovely bright reds we get - commonly people seem to get 'tomato soup orange'. My dyeing 'bibles' are three old books: and one thing shines through in these - water quality. The old dye-houses were in areas where water produced the best results. Madder does best in hard water, but Talgarth is in a valley of old red sandstone (not that I'm a geologist or anything - that's what is always mentioned when local agents are selling a farm....).

Using Madder extract at 10% weight of goods, I dyed samples on various shades of Shetland wool, using water from three sources, using observations around the water source as a guide to the sort of quality to expect:

1. Our spring at Pontithel, just along the road from Talgarth. This used to feed a pond for the Victorian lime kilns and charcoal ovens, now demolished to foundations, and for years was left to run through a pipe in the wall from where it drained through the ground and down to a stream. The end of the pipe had a great limey crust, so I wondered if this meant the water would produce even better reds.

2. The water running from an underground pipe at our mill near  Newquay, Ceredigion. The deposits accumulating around this pipe are very rust coloured, and the soil is on the acid side of neutral. The stone in the buildings often has rust-red colouring, and wherever water runs (and being an old water-mill there's quite a lot!) it leaves orange stains.

3. Tap water from Talgarth. This is what we usually use, and what I would use for a 'cold' dyeing and dyeing at different temperatures.

The wool was all mordanted with Alum at 8% and Cream of Tartar at 7% (Cream of Tartar can also affect Madder, some people prefer not to use it)

Pontithel: the slightly darker/duller sets have had iron added towards the end of dyeing. the photo doesn't do the colour justice - the reds are very full and a beautiful colour. This means that I am going to have to have large conatiners to fill from the spring every time I want to dye with Madder...

Felin: You can see the difference though, especially in the lighter red in this set of samples (below). Adding iron made the wool a little harsh - probably because of iron already present in the water. On fawn and grey yarns, the Madder produced some lovely terracottas. So - now there's 24 shades!

 Different temperatures also affect Madder. The best reds are gained by controlling the temperature at 60%. For this set, I used a precision temperature controller and dyed each of the yarn samples at the temperature indicated for 45 minutes, adding iron as before to get the darker colours. Another 6 shades!

 Finally, how much colour can you get just by soaking at room temperature? This last set were left at intervals as on the cards. The dye pot was stirred up daily and left in the dark. I wound some of the yarn afterwards onto a second set of cards and left them in the west facing window. I was pleasantly surprised to find little difference in intensity of colour after 2 months. I really must do some simple washing tests though as well.
This test was interesting - Madder takes time and patience to get a really good colour, lots of attention and slow raisin of temperature. Leaving it cold to it's own devices gave an even colour and left me time to do other things!

My old books have several other recipes and notes for madder, so I'm not quite done yet.....