Week 5 Lab Data Group 1: Wool Dyeing

There were 3 days of lab this week. The first was on Wednesday, the 29th.

On Wednesday, we applied a mordant to our wool. We used 27 grams of a nice wool roving, 83 grams of wool our class carded, and 8 grams of wool I spun into yarn. We then combined our wool with another group’s and put it all in a cast-iron pot. The wool then totalled at 233.33 grams. We then covered the water with room-temperature water and added 35 grams of aluminum sulfate, which equaled 15 percent of our total wool weight. We then began to periodically add boiling water to the mix to heat the water.

Once this process started, I began taking the temperature at various times until the end of the period. It should be noted that the wool and mordant stayed in the water until roughly 4:00 pm.

The second day of lab was our trip to the sheep farm. Here we dyed our wool over a fire. My group was once again combined with group 2, and we used weld dye. Our dye was from full stalks of weld with the leaves and florets still on. It is important not to change the temperature of the wool too harshly, or it will seal up and prevent effective dyeing. As such, we allowed our dye to warm up in the sun before putting it on the fire. We used the same wool from the day before, but we also added some unmordanted wool to see a comparison. We wrapped this wool around wooden spoons to help differentiate them. The spoons did not fully fit into the pot; as such, the wool was not fully submerged the entire time. The rest of the wool was unwrapped and spread out to ensure the maximum amount of wool was exposed to the dye. I once again recorded times and temperatures once the pot went onto the fire. This process was not too involved. I noted that there was not much to do aside from managing the temperature of the pot over the fire. This job could be done in the background while doing other chores.

Finally, on our third day, we hung our wool to dry and observed our findings. We noted that our dye was not as effective as we had hoped. The gray wool we used was largely unchanged. The white wool had turned a faint yellow/green tinge. The unmordanted wool had also not changed. We are unsure why our dye was not very effective, other than perhaps it was a natural limitation of the weld. It is unlikely that such a light colored dye would be able to dye a darker material like the gray wool. The dyed wool was rather dull, but it had changed color in some sense. It was observed to look like “dull yellow snow”. It was also observed to smell very bad.

Here is an image of our wool being dyed: