Curly Dock Mordant

Dock or sorrel are useful plants for mordanting – this was a fact that I’d gotten from reading and made a mental note of. I couldn’t remember where I read it, so I decided to just go ahead and try it. I picked curly (or curled) dock (Rumex crispus) in the roadside around July-August. Curly dock is a tall plant with a reddish seedhead.

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The seeds of curly dock.

Curly dock can be distinguished from other related species from the fact that its seeds are enclosed by three petals that have a growth on the outside that looks like a seed but is not.

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Enclosed seeds of curly dock.

I used about 100 g of stalks with flowers for a test skein of about 12 g of wool. I boiled the curled dock the first day and let it cool off. The next day, I heated the yarn in the sorrel bath to just under boiling, then let the yarn cool off in the sorrel bath (for a couple of days in the end, because I had other fish to fry). After the sorrel mordanting in the dark red sorrel soup, the yarn was coral red.

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The concoction of curly dock, and yarn treated with it.

Finally to the dyeing part of the experiment. I dyed my sorrel mordanted yarn plus two other 12-g test skeins (one unmordanted and one mordanted with 10% alum, my standard mordant) with madder. The dye bath was 40 g of madder root in rainwater, and you can see the result below. As expected, the alum mordanted wool is an intense madder red, but the unmordanted and sorrel mordanted wools are the exact same shade of orange (and a nice orange I think). But I’m going to call this a failure, since the sorrel mordant didn’t make a difference from no mordant.

Alum treatment gives the usual madder red – no mordant or treatment with curly dock both give orange.

So what went wrong? In the end, I realized that I read about sorrel mordant in India Flint’s “Eco Colour”, the exact information she gives is:

“Dry and grind the roots and mix with water to make a tannin-rich soaking solution. The leaves of this genus are also rich in oxalic acid. Even the dried seeds have mordant qualities.”

This doesn’t completely solve my mystery, though. The roots contain tannin, which only works as a mordant on plant fibers, not wool. But I used the flower stands with leaves, which (like rhubarb leaves) contain oxalic acid, which should work as a mordant on wool. Maybe the amount was just too low? I have to try tris again next year.

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