Tag: oak galls

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Plants are simply placed in boiling water and simmered. Soaking overnight is also useful.  Bought dried stock like madder is useful for plants not easily found in UK.

  Flora used a fabric pre-mordant (to soak fabric in) - soya milk. I use alum at home for silk premordant.

To achieve white or cream space designs on the dyed cloth the area has to be resisted.  One resist method is clamping, another is tying with string or rubber bands; to prevent dye penetrating to fabric.  Fabric composition affects dye penetration.  The lace on the left is obviously not natural, but an acrylic or a polyester, with a small amount of cotton which takes the dye.

Oak galls surprisingly made a good light brown; a pleasant coffee or caramel, which would go with other colours. Folding and clamping make a good resist for white or cream designs. Triangles of wood can be used and clamped to form a 'resist' to the dye penetrating.  this method needs experimenting with. As I have a lot of golden silk results from many plant dyes featured on this blog site; they could be overdyed with this clamping method to achieve gold patterns. There are many blogs about this type of 'resist' dyeing, some very accurately done for geometrical results. See my Hand Printing ideas Pinterest board showing many examples of shibori.