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DYEING: Temperatures and dye baths

© Lili Pintea-Reed

I got an interesting letter several weeks ago from someone who did not know that in the USA where I live we still use the Farenheit temperature system. The person thought I used very high temperatures to dye. This was due to the fact that Celcius equals not quite two points of temperature on the Farenheit scale. I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. I've also come to find out that the word simmer has many meanings to different poeple so lets clarify our terms in the hopes for better understanding.

I have a very free-form, relaxed approach to dyeing cloth or fiber which I realize is not everyone's style. So lets define some terms.

Simmer: My cook book defines this as 150 to 170 Farenheit.

Boil: this the point at which water starts to vaporize 212 degrees Farenheit, or 100 degrees Celcius.

On a fundamental level what many beginning dyers don't understand is that you already are familiar with the extraction process for removing color from leaves, roots and seeds. Almost everyone has brewed a pot of tea, or a cup of coffee. And just like brewing tea or coffee, when you dye the less heat to get results -- the better. Some dyes are notoriously sensitive to heat like madder root and its relatives, bedstraw or cleavers. People who write saying they have gotten muddy browns from madder simply had too much heat on the dye pot.

Some dyes like prickly pear, or poke berries, are best done without any heat simply by letting the fiber soak in the fermenting mass of fruit, to release the nice red color. Indigo dyeing is done without heat by fermenting the indigo or woad in a pot of fermented urine (or the modern equivelant). When expossed to the air and oxygenated, the blue color appears like magic! Smelly magic, but magic none the less! But as you can see, no heat is involved at all.

On the other hand, you can boil tumeric to release the color without ruining it a bit, which is why I recommend it to beginners.

However, let me note, no fiber is helped by high heat. It cooks the protein in silk and wool (think of eggs congealing), and mats and shrinks cottons. While bast fiber can take alot of heat, it will ruin sensitive colors. So if you have read books which described great boiling vats of of dye fiber written by non-dyers, please ignore these images. While white linens in days of old certainly could take a good boil to get them white, in dyeing one can get by with a light simmer and an overnight cooling in the dye bath to set the color just fine. Silk, wool, and other protein fibers should get less heat and a longer soak, bast fibers can take a bit more.

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