Hello everyone !
Last week I did an experiment with dying linen, wool, and silk in black elder berry juice (Sambucus nigra).
I was a little experienced in this topic, because last year I tried it, but, only with linen.
Setting o this year experiment was completely medieval, I used open fire and pottery.
I started the process from boiling 10 kg of elder berries, which next I squezzed to get only juice, without other parts of fruits. Then I put big pot of juice on a weak embers.
Dying on the open fire is quite difficult, because of temperature control, which must be controlled by feeling. In my experience best temperature is when I could put my hand into the dye, but only for a moment, because it is too hot.
I think that is about 70-80 degrees Celsius.
First I dipped in the dye natural white silk. It took colour in less than a minute, so I took it out and wash in a cold water with potassium alum, which is a natural colour fixer.
Alum was known in Middle Ages, but it was very expensive, because of that, more popular was human urine... At the moment I am not ready for this kind of experiment,but maybe in the future I will share with You my conclusions about it.
I decided to put the silk one more time into the dye, and it was a good decision, colour has become more intensive.
The result You can see below.
Pure woolen yarn was dyied as the second. It also get colour very fast, and also it was dyied twice. All the time with washing in water with potassium alum. I think, that because of greater thickness than silk wool looks more intensive and darker. I am also aware, that photos from my phone are not very good, so you cannot see this as well as I do.
In the end I dyied linen, in the same method that I used with other textiles. It also get nice colour, maybe not so fast as the others, but colour was most intensive, something between purple and pink. But as I wrote at the begenning of this article, I dyied linen last year, and I used it as lining in one of my medieval tunics. After year I can see that colour has become more grey blue than purple. It is nothing new, most books about dying says that most difficult is to fix the colour on linen.
