Mordant Monday: brat


Using weld and indigo, you can get awfully close to this new, exciting color!

This is the basic recipe

Start with a mordanted cotton bandana, soak it in warm water for 30 minutes to thoroughly wet it out, and dip in a very light indigo vat. You want to lightest, sky blue shade. Let it oxidize and rinse well. Next, measure 8% weld extract, 2% calcium carbonate and 2% soda ash. If you want to know the dry weight, the bandana is about 34 grams. Carefully dissolve and mix the ingredients together. Add the dye mix to a dye pot large enough to hold the bandana and filled with enough water so the bandana can move easily. Stir the dye well. Put the indigo dipped bandana into the dye pot and start heating the dye pot gradually while stirring and moving the bandana. Once the temperature is between 125-150F, the rich yellow color will develop. With the light indigo background, the color will turn a bright chartreuse green! Rinse well in room temperature water and dry away from direct light. Note: we use a lot of weld to get a super saturated color. Plan to exhaust the dye bath with additional shades of indigo and adding them to the dye pot once you’ve achieved the weld color. If you look carefully at the image, you can see another green made with a slightly darker indigo dip in the pot. You’ll be able to get colors like chartreuse, teal and other lovely green shades.

For silk and wool fabrics or yarn: Mordant with aluminum potassium sulfate at 15%. Follow the same recipe as above, but reduce soda ash percentage to 0.5% and calcium carbonate to 1%. The image below shows brat on silk yarn and cotton fibers.

A spoon of yellow powder on a stack of bright yellow and green fabrics and yarn

Ingredients we used to get this color: