craftgrrl | Natural Dyes, Batik Update (Reply)

Here's my previous post about this.

1)I've decided neither to batik to resist the circles nor to try to make rice paste resist as would have been traditional. Each would have presented several problems. I stumbled on this awesome sounding product, ordered it, and can't wait for it to get here for me to try. I needed something that would be able to withstand hot-temperature dyeing but still come out easily (thus ruling out gutta, which apparently has to be dry cleaned out!) and Magik Batik fits the bill exactly : it's recommended to use a very hot dyebath. Has anyone else ever used this product?

2) I've been poring over two natural dye books. Dye Plants and Dyeing by John and Margaret Cannon turns out to be focused on the dyeing of wool. It contains many example color swatches of the colors you can get with different mordants and with acid or alkaline baths, but presumably they are what the color will be on wool. The text will mention if the plant is known to produce a nice color on silk or cotton or linen. Many plants are covered, but the recipes are often not nearly as detailed as the ones found in The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing : Traditional Recipes for Modern Use by J.N. Liles. The recipes in that book are very specific and usually each plant mentioned has several for different types of fiber/fabric and different shades possible with the same plant. The same goes for their mordanting instructions : detailed, several methods for each fabric for each mordant. Much more talk of silk dyeing with is useful to me.
I've bought a test yard of silk habotai and alum mordant. I plan to mordant it with one of the silk mordanting recipes from The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing, and try to get the "beautiful violet-purple" alkanet root apparently has been use to produce on silk when used with the aforementioned mordant, according to the instructions in Dye Plants and Dyeing. I already actually had some alkanet root... just the right amount for the yard of fabric, amazingly. If a good color is produced in my test run, I will buy more alkanet root to dye the final project. If I don't get the result I need, I will give in and use a synthetic acid dye for silk. I hope the alkanet works. It's the most similar I think I can get to what would have actually have been used to produce that color in that era in Japan. That root doesn't seem to be commercially available, but alkanet, like that root, needs particular mordanting for the right shade and isn't very lightfast. Apparently the not so lightfastness was somewhat desirable.
Pictures of the entire test run dye process will be taken and posted with the results. ;)
I plan on ordering synthetic silk paints to color the circles that the pinwheels will be embroidered over. It would just cost too much and be too hard for the amount of time I have.

3) I've confirmed that the shibori mentioned in the caption is dapple shibori, aka kanoko shibori, and have Shibori : the Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing out from the library instructing me how to create the dapple pattern. I might modify the technique slightly so that while it is based on the same principle it's a little easier and less time consuming. I'm thinking maybe twist ties instead of thread wrapping to make it go faster. >.> I plan on doing a test run of course! Lots of test runs for lots of things.