Day 1 of the 31 Marigold Fermentation Dye Vat.
Today I made thirty-five wool loops for my dye vat, one of which will remain out of the vat as my test swatch and I will put it in a journal later. I’ll remove one loop per day from the vat, photograph it, wet and after it’s been rinsed and dried.
I really don’t have much to say today philosophically speaking, it’s a wet cold day here and to be honest I wish it would snow.
I am thinking about washing the one-gallon bucket I found in my wet studio and starting my fermentation vat. I still need to go to the store to get a fish tank bubbler for my fermentation vat.
Thoughts on Fermentation: You can do the vat one of two ways, fermentation using a bubbler to introduce oxygen into the vat, or without the bubbler. If you do it without a bubbler you will need to either seal the vat entirely with a tight fitting lid which is similar to solar dyeing and you could even use a one gallon glass jar for this experiment, or you will have to heat it up every couple of days to prevent mold from growing in the vat. Mold will definitely shift the final colors, and quite possibly in a direction that is not desirable.
I realize that using a bubbler is not true fermentation, it is however my method of choice when utilizing a fermentation dye vat. If it were mid summer I would put the vat outside in a sunny area, and let the Sun do its magic, that said, however, it’s late fall here and I really don’t want my house smelling like a swamp right now, because very often that’s what a true fermentation dye vat smells like, swamp water.
After I start my vat I’ll make up an alum mordant bath and mordant the wool loops, rinse them afterward, and add them to my vat.
