Onion Skin Natural Dye Tutorial Video

Katie Vota Onion-skin Dye Tutorial from Filmhaus Grafik on Vimeo.

Thanks to the fabulous Sarah Little for her help with yet another amazing video!

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The Art of Plant Micrography

The fabulous Justin Ray just profiled my new art(collab) project on Complex! Check it out HERE.

If you want to see the full project, I'm using collabfinder-- check it out too.

Dye Day in Mahuaypampa

I'm just posting images from this dye day, as no new information was collected, other than that 1. Chicaron (fried pig pieces) is not my favorite food & 2. Sallac is still the most organized community I've worked with for these dye workshops...

Urine Vat Indigo

Saturday's Vat: 7.25kg lana + 507g Indigo

1. Ferment the Urine
2. Grind indigo super fine with a large mortar and pestle.


3. Put 20 gallon buckets of urine in a large vat.
4. Dissolve the indigo in the urine using nylons.
5. Let sit 30min to an hour.
6. Measure appropriate amount of yarn (and watch the weavers having a heated discussion).


6. Add yarn, stir until saturated.

Dye in Chayatire

Chayatire is a community, about an hour and a half outside of Cusco, up the mountain from Pisac (in the sacred valley). Elevation: almost 4000m This community does almost exclusively Ley techniques in their weaving, and they love their reds/purples more than anything. I mean, they REALLY love red, to the point we did nothing but cochineal-based dyes until (and finished them after) lunch. 4 types of cochineal dye colors, using 22kilos of Cochineal yesterday: Bright Red (Fire Scarlet), Dark Red, Garnet, and Purple.



And so you get an idea what a vat in this situation looks like, here's the Cochineal dye notes I took yesterday:

Rojo Oscuro:
80L pot
~30kilos Lana

2.5 tazas Alum
1.75 tazas Citric Acid
2Kilos + 5 tazas Cochineal
2tazas Vinagre

Morado Oscuro:
80L pot
~20kilos Lana

2 tazas Alum
2 tazas Citric Acid
2 kilos Cochineal
5 tazas Copper Sulfate

Rojo Claro:
Q’uolle yellow first
Cochineal is added to the same yellow vat, after the most flowers possible are strained out.

80L pots
~20kilos lana

2 tazas Alum
1 taza Citric Acid
1.5 kilos Cochineal

Also:
Exhaust Rojo Claro – Add more Q’uolle for orange
Exhaust Rojo Oscuro – Add more Alum/Citric Acid/ Cochineal/ Copper Sulfate for purple
Exhaust Morado – Added to a fresh Rojo Oscuro vat to make granate.

Cochineal Notes:
Alum = Mordant
Citric Acid = Helps yarn absorb the Cochineal’s color, because otherwise it washes out
Vinegar = helps set color (modifier)

I'm not sure most of the fiber artist I know can imagine an 80L pot let alone the amount of yarn that fits into one. But that's how it was (and always is) at the dyes. My plan for these recipes is to cut them down to only being for 1kilo of yarn. That way, it might actually be useful for someone like me (or the Center's future volunteers).

Some pictures I took during the Cochineal Dyes:

Sorting the skeins for the different dyes we'd be doing.



Preparing dyes. The first is Chilq'ua (dark green), the second is Palo-Palo (peach).





Some of the Tejadoros stirring the dye pots. There are more male weavers in Chayatire than any other community the center works with.



Removing yarn from the vat.



Cochineal pots simmering...



More hoisting of yarn from vats (piles and piles of red yarn!)





This girl was the daughter of one of the community elders. She was absolutely fascinated by us (the strangers) and kept trying to creep over to get closer without us noticing (she also snuck up on me and touched my hair at one point, so cute). We gave her some of our extra potatoes, which she took shyly, and then climbed into her dad's lap.



After lunch was Palo-Palo (peach), Kinsa Q'uchu (turquoise), Chilq'ua (dark green), Orange (bright red cochineal exhaust + more Q'uolle), and el color del diablo (which is basically a dark dark colored vat, where all the cochineal exhaust water that's left is mixed, sometimes with a bit of other dye waters, and they get a burgundy/brown color). I myself ended the day with a skein of bright red, a skein of dark red, 2 skiens of garnet, a skein of dark purple, a skein of turquoise, and a skien of orange. Not a bad haul, if I say so myself.

Urea-based Indigo Vats

How Midevil... And yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. A small garbage can full of fermented urine that you dissolve ground, pre-reduced natural indigo into by putting the indigo into a nylon stocking and soaking it in urine, then wringing it out until it’s all dissolved…. It’s kinda like doing laundry by hand? Except extremely smelly and horrific if it splashes. So once it’s dissolved, then you add the yarn and stir and leave it sit for a few weeks. That simple right? Except that the dissolving was supposed to be done for when we got there and it wasn’t, so Indira and I each had a vat of our own to dissolve indigo into—which took us over 2 hours. Over 2 hours standing over a tub of urine, continuously dipping and re-dipping a stocking full of indigo into it. Then, once we got it dissolved, we had to hunt for the yarn (which was also supposed to be there and weighed already). And instead of just weighing and adding it, we had to wait for the weavers to stop arguing over how much yarn each of them got to add to the vats before we could get things finished. And now? 3 weeks to wait. And then we can add more yarn to the vats for an exhaust dye.

Dye Day in Sallac

On our way home, driving down a dirt road with frequently occurring switchbacks, I had this realization that I live in the Andes Mountains... Maybe the coolest realization ever. Like anything else I'm surrounded with daily, I think sometimes I take them for granted. They're gigantic and gorgeous and in Cusco, they're just part of the city. However, once outside of Cusco, they're all you see and you have to move with them and between them to get anywhere. Long story short, mountains are gorgeous and I love them.

Today I woke up at 5:30am so I could accompany Nilda at her yearly dye day at Sallac, a village south of Cusco. Very few things other than natural dyes could get me out of bed at that hour. We drove the hour and a half to Sallac, the last half hour of which was spent on the above mentioned switch backs, working our way from the bottom to the top of a mountain. We got there and it was the most organized dye anything I've ever seen. The yarn was already scoured and sorted by color, the stoves were lit and water was already boiling, they dyes they had were already in their pots, clotheslines were hung, sticks were positioned next to their vats, and all the weavers were present. We unloaded and began immediately.



Today we did 12 dye vats:

Q'uolle

A flower dye that gives yellows. When combined with a Cochineal exhaust bath, you get deep golden yellows.

Fire Scarlet Cochineal- Using the yellow dyed yarn and the 1st yellow vat, you add red cochineal to the vat after straining out the flowers. Then you re-add the yellow yarn, as well as Alum and Citric acid to get a really beautiful true red.

Lichen

Lichens here grow on the cliff faces, and give rusty copper browns
**note: we were using low-altitude lichens today. high altitude lichens give slightly different colors

Palo-Palo

A twig that is bundled and dried, and then chopped roughly into small pieces before dyeing. It gives pretty peach/salmon colors (Durasno).

Awaypili

A purple leave that is dried and then dyed with. By itself, it give a medium to dark blue-purple.

Red-Purple Cochineal- The yarn is dyed first in a awaypili vat, the leaves are strained out of the water and shaken from the yarn, and the cochineal is added to the dye water. The yarn is re-added with Alum and Citric acid to achieve really dark warm purples.

Burgundy Cochineal

Cochineal on white yarn with citric acid and alum. With no color modification from other vats, the color is less true red as it has a little pink/purple in it.

Chilq'ua

A shrubby leafy plant that grows everywhere in the mountains, on hill sides and along the sides of the roads. The leaves are long and narrow and are used fresh for dyeing. They give beautiful middle greens, and with the addition of Cupric Sulfate (found in the volcanic rock here) they give dark greens and olives.

Chilq'ua/Q'uolle mix- gives a "limon green" as they say here, which by that they mean the green of the peel of a lime.

Q'uolle + Cochineal exhaust vats- give either golden yellow or orange depending on the ratio of dyestuffs.

Other than dyeing, I was lucky enough to be taken out to their 4 Prickly Pear Cactus sites around the village. They are growing them with the intention of trying to start a Cochineal insect crop, and as they the community furthest south, they're potentially warmer than the rest. The cacti were really cute and had little new growth buds along their tops like crowns. While we were out, they showed me what Chilq'ua and Q'uolle looked like as plants, which was cool too.

The Prickly Pear Cactus


The Q'uolle


We were basically finished with the dyeing by the time lunch rolled around. Lunch was a little embarrassing, because the 4 of us in Nilda's party were treated as "honored guests" and therefore were served our soup first and given bigger portions of meat than anyone except the village elders. Nilda and I agreed it was an awkward position to be in, but it's rude not to eat it and who would you share it with if you could?

After lunch, we rinsed anything we'd left cooking during lunch, cleaned all the pots and tubs, sorted the yarn, packed up, and drove home. Got back around 4pm, exhausted and stuffy from the campfire smoke, but I wouldn't have traded it for anything.



**NOTE: Sallac is one of the only villages in the area that uses Ikat. A bunch of what we dyed were tied Ikat warps. I'm always really excited to see these weavings in the Center's shops, because it's really rare here.

Dyeing in Chinchero

Today was a dye workshop with the weavers in Chinchero. Amazing. We dyed yellow (flower dye), orange (flower dye mixed with cochineal), orange (lichen), peach (woody stems), red (cochineal), purple (cochineal with a cupric sulfate modifier), green (plant leaves), really dark green (plant leaves with cupric sulfate), turquoise (plant with fungi), pink (second dye in cochineal vat), and there were still a few more pots on the stoves when I left! I still don’t know what they dyes are called in Spanish however I’m now able to identify which plants make which colors, and how to prepare most of these plants for cooking. They use alum in large rock crystal form, and citric acid to modify ph, as well as cupric sulfate which is found in the volcanic rock in the area—much different from the blue vitriol I’m used to (safer too!).



The workshop today was the children of the weavers, a group of biology & botany students from Washington University in Oregon, myself, and Clara. Nilda and the weavers oversaw the day’s proceedings and directed what was to be done in what order. Dyeing in Peru is an all-in-one process (ie. the yarn is mordanted and dyed at once, and the dyestuff is cooked with the yarn). First was the preparation of the dyestuffs and heating the water with the mordant in it.



The leaves needed their stems removed, the plant with fungi and the woody stems had to be chopped into little pieces, the cochineal ground to a powder, the flowers removed from their stems, ect. So once the dyestuff was prepped, it went into the pot and the quantity of yarn allocated for that dye went in with it. It cooked until it looked like it was the right color (no specific timing). As it cooked, if it looked not to be the right color, the modification was just tossed into the pot and then you stirred frantically. So, if it needed to be more… red maybe? You added vinegar to the cochineal and stirred. If the yellow was too yellow and needed to be more gold, a bucket of red dye water from one of the cochineal pots was poured into the pot and you stirred frantically. They removed the pot from the wood stove and pulled a bucket of dye water out of the vat when they wanted to add the copper modifier. The copper was added to that small bucket, stirred it in until dissolved, and then poured it into the pot and then you stir like crazy (you stir with large sticks, btw, because these pots could cook a small person). Then the pot is put back on the heat. Once it’s cooked enough, the pot is taken off the wood stove, and a massive group of people hoist the yarn out of the pot with the large sticks, hold it there to drip, and then drop it into a large tub to be set aside and sorted later.





Then the dye water is used for an exhaust vat or its color is modified for another color entirely. I later ended up going through the red cochineal and the purple cochineal vats, sorting yarn (my hands are now various shades of orange and purple). Once the skeins were separated, they were laid on the wooden fence and sorted by what type of yarn they were. Once things calm down a bit and the yarn is sufficiently cool, it is then rinsed out.



During the day there were a few very interesting things that went on. The first is I ended up giving a mini science lesson on the chemistry of natural dyeing to the biology/botany students—why they use protein based fibers, what the chemical names of the mordants were and what they basically do, why you use them, how the colors change based on PH, dyes I use in the states, ect. They were absolutely fascinated and I was having a great time. It was nice to feel helpful, and I always love talking to scientists about dyeing because they come at it from such a different (but awesome) perspective. The second interesting thing is they served a 3 course lunch for everybody… It began with a delicious broth based barley and veggie soup, dressed with cilantro. There was toasted barley and corn on the table for snacking and spicy home-made salsa. Then the second course which included: a purred bean dish that had the consistency of hummus, a veggie dish of swiss chard, potato, vinegars and spices that was AMAZING, a cooked salad of lima beans, carrots, with peeled tomatoes, fresh onions, and cubed cheese, boiled corn and potatoes and lima beans (a staple), and fried corn flour biscuits with peppers and cheese. Then the third course, seasoned and roasted cuy (which tastes like duck btw). To finish it off, they served Matte de Coca tea. I WAS SO FULL (Estoy muy satisfecha). I helped serve, because they needed it and ate in between helping. People wanted to know what things were (which I felt special when I knew). The third and maybe strangest/coolest (figuratively and literally) thing that happened today, was that, after lunch, it hailed on us!!! This is very strange weather here. We all had to duck under the awnings to seek shelter and keep working. It hailed for almost 45min. The children were running around, throwing showballs at each other (they’d probably never seen such a thing before!) So we all finished out the day with wet pants and shoes….



I left around 4pm, taking a super crowded taxi back to Cusco (2 ppl in the front passenger seat, 4 in the back seat, and 2 in back of the hatchback). Indira (one of the women from the CTTC, who is in charge of organizing dye workshops) and I went to the grocery store on our way home. And yet I don’t have it in me to cook this evening after the lunch I had!! Best things about this evening? Hot showers and a brand new archeologist apt. mate Adrienne!!!

Coreopsis Dye

Coreopsis Flowers give an amazingly bright and vibrant yellow color, that surprised me with how strong it was in concentration.

The recipe:

Mordant yarn with Alum and Tin
3oz Alum per Lb wool
1/2 oz Tin per Lb wool
2oz Cream of Tarter per Lb wool
1/2 cup salt

Dissolve alum, tin, salt and cream of tarter in enough water for yarn to move freely. Add yarn and bring to a boil. Cook a half hour and let sit for an hour. Rinse completely and hang dry.

The dye
Coreopsis is a 2:1 ration material to dyestuff. In my vat I had 5oz coreopsis flowers. I cooked them a half hour (any more and you'll kill the color from flowers). Strain them out, pressing the flowers against the bottom of the strainer to get out all the juice. Wet yarn (in this instance I was using Alpaca) and add to the pot. Bring back to a low simmer and cook for 45min. Rinse until the water runs clear and hang dry.