I love greys, they work so well on their own, or with as a background with pops of bright colour, I also love to mix them with naturally dyed colours adding them into a pallet to create an element of sophistication.
Last summer whilst honing my natural dye skills, I experimented with using greys as undertones for natural dyes, creating extra colours which worked as shadows, it worked a treat and I was hooked, but what I loved more than anything were just the greys themselves, they were soft warm greys and they are really fun to make.
Tannins and Iron when combined create greys, its easy to do, and you can use what you have at home if you don’t have access to commercial tannin extracts or Iron (ferrous sulphate).
Tannin extraction has stayed the same basically forever, the tannin source which can be wood, leaves, and oak galls, there are many natural sources of tannins even tea leaves will work. When soaked in water, the tannin comes out and it is then processed from there. For this experiment, I collected Oak galls in June from under our Oak tree in the garden.
I blended these in a grinder (please take care if you do this, tannins can be toxic and irritating to the throat, it’s wise to wear a dust mask when doing this, and best to use separate equipment for dyeing than you use in your kitchen) You can also crush them with a hammer into pieces. In general the smaller you get them the easier the tannins will leach out into the water.
Pop them into a jar and pour over boiling water, leave them for a few hours. I left these for a few hours.
Filter out the solids when you are done, I used a jam jar and a coffee filter paper, which worked well.
Now you want to soak your yarn or fabric in the tannin to absorb it. For this experiment, I used some of our Cupro embroidery hanks and a piece of linen fabric. I used cellulose fibres as these are more tolerant of Iron than protein fibres, although you can use wool, iron can affect the handle, and when used in too larger amounts can degrade the integrity of the fibre. Dilute your tannin liquid and add your yarns to soak.
I left these overnight to get a good absorbency. In the morning I squeezed out the threads and gave them a rinse in warm water to remove any excess tannin.
Iron
I use ferrous sulphate for this as I wanted to be able to replicate my results, I use roughly 4% of the weight of the goods, so if I had 100g of yarn I would have used 4gms of Ferrous sulphate. You can make your own iron water to use as a mordant for this by rusting nails in vinegar and water, the only problem is you don’t know what percentage of iron you are applying and you may damage your fibres, so this is something you will need to experiment with.
I made a water bath with the ferrous sulphate solution and then dropped my tannin soaked threads and fabric. The reaction is very quick and these only needed soaking for a few minutes, once they were done I rinsed them with washing liquid and left them to dry.
You can use this solution again so store in a jar and make sure you label it!
The result is gorgeous dove grey embroidery threads.
