test strips from the maiwa course.different concentrations of ferrous acetate and aluminum acetate on cotton. the brown one is cutch, the pinkish one is old molding cochineal which i resisted to throw away. after discarding the mold it still yielded color.those poor little bugs that worked so hard to make color dererved better.there's some lac on the terrace evaporating. the resulting color lake will be useful for painting either cloth or paper with some gum arabic medium as binder.
i find quite extraordinary the awareness of natural dyes that i have gained with the course. have been re-reading carefully some of my dye books and finding nuggets of knowledge that had escaped in the first reading. especially about mordants. to me they had been up to now the way to fix color to cloth, but there's so much more to the mordanting process; it is a craft in itself.
i have wound and scoured some organzine silk for a warp.carefully considering the dye and the mordanting process. leaning towards benibana which i want to study in depth and adequately handle it.it is a challenging dye so the rewards are significant. it is also a cold dye, another consideration in mind with the energy prices up in the stratosphere.
neki desu
