brazil wood

Brazilwood, second attempt

| msvarnyk

The first attempt has been described in the previous post here. I needed to try to increase the concentration of the dye, or so I thought.

My first “recipe” was: 50g brazilwood, 500 ml water. Soaked overnight. Simmered for 15 min, added alum.

Second “recipe”: 200g Brazil wood, 1000 ml of distilled water (tried 500, but that was not enough to have the bath liquid), 2/3 of tums tablet. Simmered for about 3 hours, added alum.

dyestuff in water before cooking
white egg in the dye
yellow egg on the right

It was not working much better than before, the white egg was still just pink, the yellow one was too orange, not red enough. Then I flipped and added a LOT of alum in the dye bath, and the eggs started to get more red.

apple wood alum
brazil wood alum
brazil wood iron
wax off
tip with some dye loss
apple yellow left,
elderflower yellow right

That worked better, but was somewhat wiping off at wax removal. you can see it in the photo of the tip. I loved this egg so much, that I did multiple versions. Last photo on the bottom right is a comparison between apple yellow base on the left and elderflower yellow base in the right (I will post the elder flower version photos separately). There is a slight difference in tone, hardly visible in the photo.

I think this is the proof of concept, that intense enough red can be achieved with brazil wood with alum over the yellow base, and black with brazil wood with iron. I’ll post the egg with red without the yellow base separately, once I do something with that egg.

What still needs to be worked out is the details of how to adjust the process, the proportions, etc. to have the dye work well on the egg shell, give a more even tone, maybe work faster, not wipe off with wax, etc. Some of these issues might be the problems with the egg shells themselves (and their prep), rather than the dye, but this is something to test at a later time, when I have access to other kinds of shells that I can process, and when I have space to do this.

The egg is from Kulzhynskyy VIII-11 (545) “Stars” from the village Tarandyntsi, Lubny area, Poltava governorate (1890).

Brazil wood, first attempt

| msvarnyk

Since I now live in EU, I could finally order brazil wood dye chips from Kremer (Germany), I guess they only have a license to sell it within EU, last year when I tried to order it to ship to Canada, they wouldn’t. So now I have it.

Why is it so important? Well, brazil wood is the only natural red dye of the ones mentioned in all of the late 19th century ethnographic sources (about the eggs) that is currently commercially available (though the availability is limited). The other red dye source mentioned is the local Porphyrophora polonica, the so-called “Polish cochineal,” or less misleadingly “Polish carmine scale insect,” or colloquially “St.John’s blood”. In Ukrainian (and similarly in several other Slavic languages) the name of the insect is chervets’ (червець), and it is related to both, the names for the color red (and sometimes the name for beautiful things), and the name of the month of June, when the insects would be harvested for the dye. But more about that on some other occasion. I could not locate a place in the world where this dye source could be purchased, and it is not clear whether it is currently used for dyeing anywhere, rather than being replaced by the Mexican cochineal.

So, the brazilwood. I have used its “older” cousin sappan wood (sometimes referred to as Eastern brazilwood), and maybe I’ll write more about it on some other occasion (in fact I might have written about it a while before), so I went for a very simple recipe more or less analogous to the proportions of chips to water I would have used with sappan wood, though it’s not very easy to properly estimate, since this brazilwood is very finely chopped, almost to the powder, so I would assume it should release more dye than the thicker chips. This is what I ended up using:

50g brazilwood, 500 ml water. Soaked overnight. Simmered for 15 min, added alum.

And this is what I got, left on white egg, right over the yellow (apple wood chips).

This is not the intensity of color I’m looking for, but the tone is right. I think I just have to make the dye bath 3-4 times more concentrated, and potentially explore some other things to add (like hardening the water). So, experiments to be continued.

Both eggs are from Kulzhynkyy’s catalogue, the left one is “the barrel with a man” XIV-15, Nemyriv area, Podillya , the right one is “swallow tails” XII-9, village Blahodatna, used to be Kherson governorate, currently between Mykolayiv and Kherson. I’m torn to whether finish them with these colors or to make a stronger brazilwood dye and dip them again. The right one is pretty much done, just need to remove the wax. The left one was still supposed to have the black background over the red, I might continue as is with brazilwood with iron and see what I get. Maybe this would be a good sample, though not properly colored.