Tannin and Mordant Experiments Part 2: Golden Marigold

Tannin and Mordant Experiments Part 2: Golden Marigold

I love dyeing with marigold. I love it for the ease with which you can use it; it’s not fussy like some natural dyes, which can be a bit of a double edged sword depending on your point of view. Since it isn’t reactive to pH or heat, you don’t have to be quite as on top of it when dyeing – you can let that water get a bit too hot if you get distracted. If you have water that isn’t perfectly neutral you don’t have to fuss with it to get that golden, almost ochre, yellow.

But, if you love fiddling with pH and heat to push the colour, you won’t get much of that with marigold. It’s a straight up dye that’s very easy, which is also what makes it a really, really good dye for a beginner natural dyer.

Probably my favourite thing too, is that almost anybody in any part of the world can grow marigolds, and experience the satisfaction of growing, harvesting, and dyeing with your own plants.

Now that I’ve waxed poetic about the plant, let’s move on to the actual experiments, shall we?

From left to right, top row is:
Myrobalan, sumac, cutch, and tannin blend on alum/soda ash.

Bottom row is:
Myrobalan, sumac, cutch, and tannin blend on aluminum acetate.

If you’d like to see exactly how much I used of each tannin and mordant, see this post here. If you read that post you’ll probably notice that I have five samples, and that gallnut is absent from this test. That’s because I had extensive experience already using gallnut with both mordants and marigold, so I saved those extra samples for a few tests I’ll show in subsequent posts.

I used 25% weight of fibre (WOF) of powdered marigold for the dye. The method I used was to take all the samples in the varying preparations and dye them all in the same dye pot, eliminating any variables that would affect colour, except for those which I was testing; the tannins and the mordant. The differences in colour and saturation you see are all due to the tannin and mordants.

While the cutch and aluminum acetate gave this rich, golden yellow, the cutch and alum/soda ash gave a significantly more washed out colour. The myrobalan and alum/soda ash gave a really clear, marigold yellow with excellent depth and evenness, and while the tannin blend with alum/soda ash wasn’t quite as strong, I enjoy its clear colour as well. Overall, looking at all the samples, aluminum acetate gave the most depth of shade, but I don’t think you can beat that myrobalan and alum/soda ash mixture.

I also did some wool samples with the marigold, because I couldn’t resist. The left column is on various kinds of wool, with the bottom being on a grey wool.

The right column is the exhaust bath on the same wools (again, with a grey on the furthest right). All wool was mordanted with my standard 10% alum (unlike cellulose, I do not use soda ash for protein fibres, which generally benefit from a slightly acidic environment; too much alkaline and it’ll degrade the wool). It’s interesting to see how different wools will take the dyes differently when they’re all in the same pot.

Side note: you can see how well the thread I used to mark each sample stands out. It’s 100% cotton sashiko thread, but I embroidered the symbols after the tannin/mordant steps. It ended up working well to show how imperative that step is.


This is part 2 of a several (on-going) part series. You can see the whole series as they get discussed here.