Day 2 Let there be Marigolds!

Time to make the Marigold Fermentation Vat!

I started out with a clean one-gallon bucket (you can pick these up at any big box store that sells paint) and filled it with screaming hot water out of my tap. I don’t use boiling water, but you could use boiling water if you wanted to do so.

I then added my two cups of dried marigold heads, you can put them in a piece of pantyhose if you don’t want debris on your final samples. I gave the marigold heads a good squish in the water and have covered the vat with a plastic plate. I’ll check on the marigolds in an hour to see if they need to be squished with water again, they should sink to the bottom of the vat within a couple of hours.

Tomorrow I’ll add my wool samples to the vat.

Off to get groceries and do meal prep for the week. Two years ago, yesterday, I started my weight loss journey. I’m down almost 100 pounds from 331 pounds. I made a decision to change my, actually our lives that day. He’s down almost 75 pounds. We both have additional weight to lose for me it’s 85 pounds, and for him, it’s another 45 pounds.

More later on how we both lost weight.

Day 1 of the 31 Day Writing Challenge

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.

Drying Marigolds

I dried the Marigold blossoms on the warm setting of my toaster oven, which I think may be around 100F for about an hour. I left over night, and this is what they looked like this morning. I’m going to let them dry for an additional day before putting them into water to start soaking.

Marigolds from Fresh to Dried

My fresh picked marigold flowers are resting on a piece of parchment paper and I will place them in my toaster oven on warm. In a couple of hours they will be dried enough to add to a gallon of warm water.