Making Sample Books for Natural Dye Experiments

Why Bother with a Sample Book?

Natural dyeing has a mischievous habit of producing one perfect skein of soft coral that you can never quite repeat. Onion skins that gave you gold in March give you a dull beige in September. The madder that sang on your alum-mordanted wool barely whispers on untreated cotton. None of this is failure; it is information. The trouble is that unless you write it down, that information walks out of the door with the dye bath.

A sample book fixes the colour to the recipe. It is a small, unglamorous habit — a ring binder, a stack of labelled swatches, a pencil — that separates dyers who muddle along from dyers who build a personal palette. Every pot becomes a lesson you can use again rather than a happy accident you can only mourn.

Setting Up Your Swatches

Consistency matters more than quantity. Cut your test pieces to a uniform size so they sit neatly in the book and dry at the same rate: 10cm squares of cloth, or 5g skeins of yarn. Prepare them exactly as you would prepare a full batch — scoured cellulose, mordanted protein — because half-prepared fibre gives you half-true results.

• Label before you dye. A permanent marker on a small cotton tag, tied loosely to the corner, survives most dye baths. Write the fibre type and mordant on it in advance.
• Cut more than you need. Three or four identical squares of each fibre let you test modifiers, compare fibres in one bath, and keep a spare.
• Include a control. One unmordanted, undyed square of each fibre in the book shows you how much of the final colour came from the mordant rather than the plant.

Recording the Dye Bath

For each bath, note the essentials in a way that a tired future version of you can read. A short paragraph beats a beautiful blank page you never fill in.

• Fibre and preparation — wool, silk, cotton, linen, and exactly how it was scoured and mordanted.
• Mordant — type and percentage of weight of fibre (wof). For example, 10% alum for wool, or a tannin bath followed by 10% alum for cotton.
• Dye material — the plant, its part, its state (fresh or dried), and its weight as a percentage of the fibre. Fresh madder root and dried madder root are not interchangeable.
• Water — volume and source. Hard tap water shifts madder and cochineal noticeably; rainwater or filtered water gives cleaner tones. Note the ratio of water to fibre, because a concentrated bath dyes deeper.
• pH — a rough reading is enough. Acid with a splash of vinegar, alkaline with a pinch of soda ash. Two baths of the same plant at different pH can look like two different dyes.

Timing, Temperature and Modifiers

Time and heat are where repeatability is won or lost. Record whether you simmered gently for an hour, held the pot at a bare steam for forty minutes, or left the fibre to cool in the bath overnight. That overnight cooling is one of the most common reasons a colour turns out richer than expected, and it is almost always forgotten.

Keep modifiers on the same page but clearly separate. Iron, copper, soda ash, vinegar and ammonia are separate experiments, not footnotes. Note the concentration, how long the swatch was dipped, and whether it was rinsed immediately or left to dry first. Iron at 2% for five minutes will sadden a bright yellow to olive; the same dip for an hour may leave the fibre tender and the colour flat.

If you are testing one dye across several fibres, arrange those swatches together on the card with the fibre names written beside them. Seeing wool, silk and cotton side by side in the same bath teaches you more about protein and cellulose than any book.

Capturing Shibori in the Book

Shibori samples need a little more description, because the pattern lives in the folding and binding, not just the dye. For each piece, record the technique, the shape and the tightness of the resist, and whether the cloth went into the bath wet or dry.

• Itajime — the fold (accordion, triangle, square), the shape of the boards or tiles, and how they were clamped.
• Arashi — the pole diameter, the direction of the wrap, and the spacing of the thread.
• Nui — the stitch pattern, the thread type, and how tightly the gathers were pulled.
• Bound resists — the number of wraps, the binding material, and the size of the bound bundle.

Keep the sample flat and untrimmed. A frayed edge and a visible gather line tell you more about the resist than a neatly pressed square ever will.

Keeping the Book Useful

Store swatches in a ring binder with card pages, one bath per page, and write a short index at the front: fibre, dye, mordant, resulting colour. Photograph each page in daylight when the swatches are dry, because many natural colours shift as they cure over the first fortnight.

Revisit the book before you plan a project, not after. The page that records a disappointing grey will save you a whole afternoon, and the page that records your best green will tell you exactly which leaf, which mordant and which twenty minutes in the iron pot gave it to you. That is the whole point: not to repeat yourself, but to know what you are doing when you do.