Today I’ve been playing around with Eastern Brazilwood (Caesalpinia sappan or Sappanwood), which comes all ground up into sawdust ready to dye my yarn. The tree is native to Southeast Asia and belongs to the same genus as Brazilwood (C. echinata). These plants contain the red dye molecule brazilin, and were big business in the past before artificial chemical dyes were invented. The country Brazil was actually named after the dye tree, and not the other way around.

I started out last night with 100g (about 4oz) of the stuff in the bottom of a thin stocking to make a kind of tea bag and stop the sawdust turning my dye bath into sludge. Apparently you can fish this out afterwards and dry and re-use the dyestuff. I simmered it with water and an antacid tablet for a couple of hours (it likes hard water and these provide chalk) then left it in the basement overnight. Then in the morning in went my yarn – several different types and weights – all pre-mordanted with alum to make the dye molecules stick to the yarn rather than just washing down the drain.

This dye is really interesting to play around with. It gave deep royal reds through to a kind of pale burgundy and quite intense corals. I had heard that altering the pH as you rinse it after dyeing has an effect so I added two teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda to one of the dips. The colour did shift right away from the coral range to something more of an intense purple-red. But the results weren’t particularly apparent once I’d rinsed it out and dried it.

The photos give the impression it is more pink than it actually appears – I think the light was quite blue coming through my window in the early morning. I’ve got a photo that also incudes a bunch of other natural dyed yarns that may give a better idea. Sappan dye is behind the more coral/intense reds, the strong cerise colour is from cochineal.