4th Assignment l BioFabricating Dyes & Materials

Our 4th week was about exploring material and coloring alternatives to current dying procedures which have heavy impacts on our environment. After the global meeting on Tuesday I started my own experiments of BioFabrication and Dying.

I started my preparation by choosing material and cut it properly.

1. Animal: 45% Mohair; 45% Wool; 10% Silk
2. Vegetable: 100% Linen

In total I had 8 bundles of each material. I prepared name tags where I marked 4 bundles of animal and 4 of vegetable with a “M” for modrant which was important for later processing steps. Hence, the preparation was completed and I could proceed in the BioLab.

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We started with cleaning:

1. wash the animal fibres with luke warm water and soap for one hour

2. cook the vegetable fibres with sodium carbonate (Here: baking soda; 2 spoons for 4 litre water) for one hour

4 bundels of each material were predetermined to be treated with a mordant

Mordant = mostly inorganic oxide, used to decrease later impact of light or washing processes on the colour, also influencing the final colour.

• Cook water
• Add mordant depending on the weight of your fabric (we used Acidum Tartaric)
• Add fibers and leave them in the boiling water for 30 minutes

This was the final step in the preparation phase and now we could start with the dying process:

I decided to dye with turmeric:

Instruction:
Use turmeric powder and mix it to a paste with a little warm water, stir it well to incorporate all the particles. Add more water while stirring before pouring it into the dye bath. This dye solution can be applied to all fibers, with or without heat.

I put ½ weight of fiber (3,75 gram) of Turmeric powder to intense the yellow shades. The recipes says, that pre-mordants are not really needed in the dying process with Turmeric but I gave it a try, anyway. Therefore, I prepared 4 pots with water and turmeric powder with 4 fibers each: 2 Vegetable (mordants and non mordants) and 2 Animals (mordants and non-mordants). The water has to boil for the vegetable stripes. Luke warm water for the animal yarn.

The results:

The effect of the pre mordant was as little as predicted by the recipes. It is difficult to see on the images but the treatment with mordant made the color a bit lighter.

I started to modify the differ