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These notes appear originally on the Yahoo Group
'Natural Dyes' and have been reproduced with the kind
permission of the author, Dick Huset.
"Three years ago after a trip up to the arctic where the
big lichen 'ears' have been an emergency food source for eons,
I experimented back at home to add new color to my wife's yarn
palette. Started with Castleman's book and cudbear
references. As a biochemist and experimentalist, here's what
I learned, and this may well help tune up the color flow.
Lichen contain the orchil dye precursors tightly bound
inside cellulose cell walls. At least as tough as wood bark.
The Castleman work results in digesting the cell walls in a
fermentation process. So, ammonia is used here to macerate,
soften, digest the material. It is not just a source of
alkaline pH change as we use it in other dye work. Three
other factors speed the digestion: warmth, moisture, and
particle size.
So, I found the best and fastest and most complete use of the
lichen to begin with blenderizing, pulverizing the lichens,
adding the ammonia/water mix until it is as thin as pancake
batter, then sealing into ziplocks. Throw into warm
sunshine.
Daily mushing up the mix is done by squeezing the bag and
turning it in the sun. Maceration is fast and uses up
ammonia, so I add a couple spoonfuls by day 7 or so. After
that I know that orchil is leaving the broken cells, so I
start opening the zip daily or better to bring in the oxygen
needed to 'develop the color'. Oxygen was not really crucial
to the first digestion days, but WOW - type color happens when
the oxygen hits the dyestuff.
Just a bit later I dump the bags of lichen mush into water in
jars with minor amounts of ammonia. If you are into early
period materials, you would not throw the mush into water, but
knead in chalk dust until purple balls were formed, then dry
these over a smudgy fire, and store on a shelf or sell to
neighbors. These were cudbear dyeballs, and stored up the
color for the future..
The reason I chose the early zip-bag process was to replicate
Castleman's little glass basins - get more sun and warmth to
the mush than would happen in a big water bath.
Hope that helps - you can see that not all chemistry types
feel obligated to be numbers oriented. I've done most of this
with only intuited measurements. And my purples and pinks and
mauves are pleasing but not reproducible.
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