January 15th was hand in day for my first MA project Research into Practice so it brought together all the experiments with natural dyes and my research into the historical and cultural evidence for natural dyes. It has been amazing and has really focussed my work to understand the processes in dyeing especially with indigo. the books I have been reading have been good resources for recipes and ancient methods and the failures - I still can't get the urine one to work perhaps it needs to be kept longer?!! I want to try woad in the Spring and Summer to see how much the colour is affected by the seasons and I have already planted madder roots and sown weld from the countryside to plant out in the Spring. The range of colours I achieved from woad is as follows -

These samples show some of the range of colours and the materials from left to right are : wool delaine, shantung silk, cotton with an Alum mordant, organic cotton with no mordant and silk without a mordant. The woad leaves were fresh and I heated the dye vat to 50c for the dyeing. The fabrics were left in the vat for half an hour.
Using Weld

 with the weld I used weld tops from Mildenhall which had boiling water poured over to wilt then left overnight. The dye was strained and fibres added to soak in the cool dye for 3/4 hours then simmered for 45 mins I have not shown many examples as they do not show the real acid yellow or rich golds. The samples were without mordant, with alum mordant, with copper mordant all in cool dye baths and the final sample with alum and simmered. The sample on the left was dipped in madder over the weld.
For madder the colours again are not well presented here and are much richer. But the samples are from left to right
Wool delaine, silk and cotton. I used madder roots from Mildenhall which were chopped then simmered for an hour but for these samples I used Fibrecrafts madder powder.

The first sample has an alum mordant, the next sample has copper as the mordant, the silk has no mordant the next silk sample has alum and the cotton samples are one with alum and one without. There was also a significant difference when samples were left to steep for several days.

Now I have a good source of samples for my next Unit and a better understanding of what affects the outcomes of the fibres.