Ironbark, mugga, écorce de fer, Mugga-Eukalyptus, corteza de hierro, Coirt iarainn

As per the previous post, ironbark leaves aren’t as plentiful this year, or at least the ones within easy reach. What about the bark, etc?

I once soaked a fair amount of kino/manna/resin collected from numerous local gums for a week (a significantly shorter period of time than what it had taken to collect), simmered some yarn… and came up with not much. Another experiment with the bark had produced a similar result. What went wrong? No leaves to act as mordant!! (note to self: Duh!).

There is plenty of bark to be collected locally, and if you can’t find it on the ground, there may be some hanging off the trunk, ready to drop without harming the tree. Apparently the name comes from the hardness of the wood; I naturally thought it was because the bark looked rusty…

A good layer on the bottom of the pot was soaked overnight, then simmered for about an hour with a handful of E. leucoxylon leaves for the tannin (as a mordant). Why leucoxylon? Because I have plenty at present (see post below).

The dye liquor colours up quickly and is a deep, reddish black. An hour’s simmering, then a straining followed by a sieving (lots of small bits…) and it was ready for the yarn: a skein of 8-ply (bottom, left), followed by one of 2-ply that had been mordanted with alum/CoT as a precaution (bottom, right). As you can see, no mordanting was necessary, but produced a slight greenish tinge on the 2-ply (inside, it looks more golden, so let’s go for old gold/nut-brown butter). The 8-ply – denser and softer –  came out a mid-chestnut brown. The colours in the pic are a little richer than in real life.

The liquor was still darker than dark, so another two skeins of the 2-ply were dyed individually. The first (top, left) came out a paler brown with a reddish tinge after an immediate wash; the second was left in the liquor overnight, producing a richer colour all round.

None of the colours match any brown sheep I’ve spun, or alpaca, so worthwhile results for all the work. Now to try with vinegar to get more red…

Blue gum, Eucalyptus bleu, Weiße Gummi-Eukalyptus, Eucalipto azul, Eoclaip gorm

(re the German name: another English name is White ironbark)

The local council had trimmed back the Eucalyptus sideroxylon trees for the first time in about ten years, or rather had trimmed them back noticeably. These were going to be the source of material for an international project (more about that in a future post), so it was down to Plan B, then Plan C…

A branch of what appears to be E. leucoxylon had come down recently (gum trees drop branches due to drought or a sudden uptake of water when the rain comes after a period of dry; this year the weather is so up-and-down that I can’t give the exact reason, which sometimes a gum doesn’t need…) and it’s still at the side of the road, though there’s less of it.

After driving past it once, I went back with pocket saw, secateurs and large bucket, then went back again for seconds. How much did I manage to harvest? Compare the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pics

I had to include a pic of what was sheltering behind the dyepots in the shed. When I first noticed it, staring at me as I went to take the pot, I can’t remember what I yelled, but it was something along the lines of, “Agggghhhhh!!!” Just surprised, that’s all. Judging by the size of it, I think this may be the one that was sitting in the garden one evening, enjoying the plums and looking very much the size of a wallaby (for overseas readers, it’s a possum, and a VERY large one). Nice fur.

Back to the dye… I just grabbed about four handfuls (more like layers as they’d been squashed down a bit in the bucket) and simmered for 45 or so mins, then added unmordanted yarn: 8-ply Bendigo Mills Luxury – the chosen yarn for the project. I wasn’t expecting a great result, but it has come out a rather pleasant butterscotch, and one that should go well in the finished item.