This week assignment was to explore Bio Dyes and BioMaterials.
====== Bio Dying

First I chose to use Beetroot as my natural dye but it didn't work well as I will show in the documentation so then I repeated the same steps with Black Beans.

In total, I prepared 8 animal fibers and 8 vegetable fibers, 4 of each group are dyed with mordant and 4 without mordant.

Animal fiber: 80% new wool and 20% silk
Vegetable fiber: Linen

I cut each material and then weighted each of them and took notes. I tried that pieces who belong to the same group had more or less the same weight. Afterwards, we prepared labels for each of my 16 pieces. Then the vegetable fibers were boiled in water with 2 tablespoons of baking soda for 60 minutes and the animal fibers were resting in water at room temperature for 60 min and then rinsed with cold water.

In the meanwhile I peeled around 300g of fresh beetroot and chopped them into small pieces, add water and start boiling with very low temperature in two different bowls(one for the vegetable fibers and one for the animal fiber). It took around 30 min for the water to be warm and start boiling a bit. Then I added 4 of the vegetable in one of the bowls and the 4 of animals in the other one. I boiled the vegetable fibers for 30 min more in the solution with a very low temperature then left them both to sit in the solution overnight.

The rest 8 fibers I calculated the quantity of mordant according to their weight and put them in hot water with the mordant. As mordant we used Tartaric acid. Afterwards, create the solution and let them sit over the night same as the first processes.

But after many of the fibers didn't take any color or few of them took a soft shade.

So I decided to try to dye them again with black beans. I left the black beans in water over the night and then added the fibers in the solution and let them sit around 24h.

For the modifying process, I used vinegar and copper. I boiled the fibers in the modifying solution 10 min for vinegar and 20 min for copper.

I worked in a group with Wei and Liane. We used the following recipe.

As starch we used tapioca and we did in total 4 biofabrics.

1.the original

2.instead of vinegar we used 70g of kurcuma powder.

3.8g of corn as starch instead of tapioca

4.15g lime juice instead of vinegar and adding 9g strawberries for color

We followed the recipe and then let them dry for 1-2 days.