May 22, 2019

14th Century Cotehardie – Dyeing the Fabric

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Read part 1: Drafting the Pattern

While working on the cotehardie pattern, I was also thinking about fabric. The lining was easy – a midweight off-white linen. The main fabric was trickier. I wanted to do a particolored cotehardie, and I had been learning about natural dye with my Viking group at the time, so I decided to do natural dye for this project as well. This meant that I needed wool for my main fabric. It proved quite difficult to find a summer weight, undyed wool.

I eventually found one at Colorado fabrics, which was described as a wool/nylon blend, but did not give percentages. Since I hadn’t found anything else, I got a narrow strip to test with. The first thing I did was a burn test, to see how much wool there was, versus nylon. Nylon burns quickly into hard, grey beads which do not crush. Wool burns more slowly, sizzles and curls away from the flame. It leaves dark, brittle beads which are very easily crushed. My burn test primarily showed the characteristics of wool so there was a good likelihood that it would take the natural dye. You can see the video of the burn test below.

For my particolored colour scheme I decided on orange and blue. Since the dress will be half one colour and half the other, I dyed the fabric before sewing it up. For the orange I used madder and an iron mordant. Madder+iron is the combination which gave me my unexpected purple hood, so I did a test piece, both to check that the dye would take on my wool/nylon blend fabric, and to make sure it didn’t end up purple! The dye took beautifully, and came out a lovely russet orange, as hoped. The main challenge on this one was keeping the dyebath hot while dyeing the full 3 yards of fabric. I discovered that you can get immersion heaters (like an immersion blender, but it has a heating element instead of the blade). If do more of this I will get one!

For the blue, I wanted to use woad, which is a slightly more complicated dyebath involving raising the pH. I followed the instructions exactly (I think!), measured all my ingredients, gave it time to develop, and my test piece came out unchanged. I even got pH strips to check that the pH was high enough. It was good and high, but for whatever reason the natural woad dyebath was an utter failure. I was running short on time at this point, so I gave in and used a modern acid dye for the blue. My test piece came out perfectly and I compared it to some woad-dyed yarn to make sure the colour was accurate. It is the right blue, but was achieved through different means. I will try the woad again at some point, when I don’t have a deadline for the project!