I’ve been intending to try overdyeing at some point, and decided to have a crack at it with one of my favourite dyes: logwood. I’ve previously found that a small amount of logwood goes a long way, and I expect to get more than this out of the dyebath. For the moment, this is what I’ve achieved:

From top to bottom:

• Silk dupion, dyed first with chlorophyll
• Cotton lawn, dyed first with chlorophyll
• Lightweight linen, dyed first with brown onion skins
• Silk dupion, mordanted with rhubarb leaves to produce a strong yellow ochre
• Silk noil, not previously dyed
• Silk habotai, dyed first with madder
• Wool, dyed first with brown onion skins
• Silk velvet, mordanted with rhubarb leaves

As you see, I’ve got a wonderful range of grungy shades out of this exercise, and I’m looking forward to trying some more combinations.

I also dyed a few threads and pieces of wool. I find that I use up the threads very quickly and never seem to have enough. I should probably dye just threads for a few batches to lay in a supply. The second photo shows some of the threads. The yellowish-brownish piece of wool on the right hand side was mordanted with rhubarb leaves, but otherwise these are not overdyed threads.

The scope for this type of experimentation is infinite. You could overdye several times, and try out all sorts of colour combinations. The more I do this, the more I realise there is to know about dyeing. Watch this space for future experiments in colour….

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of dyeing with logwood.

So what is logwood? According to the Wild Colours website, logwood is a tree originally found in the forests of Central America. Obviously it’s not something you can easily grow in your back garden (well, not here in rural Lancashire) so the best way to buy it is either as a powdered extract or in the form of chips of wood. Logwood gives purples and, if overdyed, can produce blacks.

I tried the extract and found it’s a very strong one. I used about 5 grams of the powdered extract and it just kept on yielding colour, getting progressively weaker, eventually producing some excellent greys.

This shows some of the big range of colours I obtained by using and reusing the same pot of dye. I dyed various weights and types of silk, linen, cotton and wool.

And here are some of the thread colours as well. I dyed silk, wool and cotton threads which all yield different colours.

I’ll write some other posts about techniques I use, about mordanting fabrics, the results from different dyes….