Three shades of Madder + Tannin
I recently made a batch of ‘Enchantment’ shirts and tried something new. Usually the process is... print on dry, scoured fabric, dry, dung bath (not real dung), tannin bath, wash, mordant, dye with madder. This is the process of the reddest shirt in this image. I realized however that tannin is itself a mordant so I wanted to try skipping the 2nd mordant bath and go from washing to dyeing in madder in hopes to simplify the process a bit. I prepped a cauldron of madder root and added a piece of printed clothing but it was not dyeing the piece red. It was a very faded lavender hue. I waited about 30 minutes then decided to add CHALK, which can bring out reds, and what I got was the deep and mild purples of the last image and the ink even darker in the iron print. It shifted the color away from red but helped with color saturation and created a lot of variation and organic patterns. I had 1 more shirt I wanted to dye so after about 45 minutes I pulled out the sweater, added CITRIC ACID to shift the pH, hopefully towards red and was able to achieve the color in the middle shirt, a magenta-ish red/purple. Do you have a favorite of the three? Next batch of items, I am going to try starting with citric acid and no chalk, so see if I can get redder, or even orange hues without a 2nd mordant.
Another layer to this alchemy is time. From my experience, pH shifted items slowly creep towards a neutral pH (because of washing?) so the two modified items could change colors over time.
