Book of Kells Project: Donn with Chestnut

 It's a very bad pun.   

"Donn" is Irish for brown and sounds like "down" in some dialects.

Yep.  Ní duine greannmhar mé.  Moving along...

Chestnuts are a staple I forage for in the fall.  I use them in stews, cakes and stuffing.  When boiling them during processing, the liquid was always dark brown.  Surely this could be used for ink or something, right?

Well, yes. Any nut with tannin can be processed with iron salts to produce ink.  Chestnut is less dramatic than oak galls or acorns, but it does work.  The color isn't black, but a warm dark brown.  Which is useful when you need brown.

 

Chestnut ink was a nice accent.  It also served as a substitution for the lack of any purple from the orchil disaster.  Really would have liked that...

As an aside, dark brown in the manuscript is attributed to iron gall ink.  But I wonder if this just isn't age or a reaction with the vellum substrate?   Because my oak tannin based ink is BLACK.  But I could imagine it might shift tone with age.  

A Rainbow of Threads: Natural Dyed Yarns - Part 2 - Brown

~Déanaimis donn

Brown.  One would think it was a simple color.  But not if one doesn't want boring beige or uninspired earth tones.  I could have used the same technique for black but with chestnut hulls instead of acorns.  That produces a very dark brown, but it's trying too much to be black, without out the coolness of actual black.  It's okay for ink, but for yarn I wanted something more like my preferred browns: rich dark color with a slight shift to the red end of the spectrum.  So instead of regular dye plants, I turned to crottle.

Crottle is a word used for a lichen dyes used in Scotland derived from Parmelia saxatilis.  Technically, what I used was a local parmelia its that can produce a similar rich brown, probably parmelia sulcuta.

NOTE:  Lichens take a long time to grow.  Please use only lichens in abundance and that have fallen off their substrate, usually tree branches.  Don't pick them off trees.  Birds and wind will provide you with plenty for a small project if you know where to look.  I gather mine in local parks, usually on the ground under conifer stands.

After gathering about a handful of lichens, I let them dry over night. Then I put them in a jar filled with half water and ammonia , leaving an inch for air at the top.   It isn't absolutely necessary to develop the dye with ammonia like with the purple lichen dyes, but I didn't want to waste time.  Turns out it develops so fast...the water starts to darken after a day...one may as well be sure.

Like developing Orchil, I shook the jar vigorously, daily for at least a week, maybe more.   By this time the water was so dark it was opaque.  Then I just let it sit for several weeks before doing anything with it.  I had an idea I'd use it as a brown ink wash in the BoK project.   And then it was there when I needed a nice warm brown.

 
I put the liquid, lichens and all, in a small sauce pan, along with the yarn that had been soaked in water.  Lichen dyes generally need no mordants. Then I boiled it up, turned the heat down to simmer, and simmered with lid on for about an hour, until the yarn looked about the color I wanted.  Then I took it off heat, set it outside to cool.  Once cool enough to handle, like the black yarn, I gently squeezed extra liquid out and hung it to dry outside.  Being another hot day, it was dry in 20 minutes or so.

Only after being completely dry did I rinse it in COLD water to wash extra dye off.    The unused "crottle" I put in a jar and saved for another project.  Who knows, maybe I'll use it in the Book of Kells project yet.

Ar aghaidh linn!

Next:  Yellow.