Dye Happy

We have been having some  fun over at my house..
Issue being that canvas and hemp rope are both notoriously susceptible to mildew and rot. Ideal culture medium, really. So over the years the people who dealt with it daily developed strategies to cope with its shortcomings and avoid some of the worst of the damage.
They generally used rope infused with pine tar during the spinning process although that reduces the strength of the rope by about 20%. It keeps the moisture out of the fibers and also inhibits the fungi somewhat from growing in the fibers. So as long as they didn't get stupid, and they allowed the ropes to dry out as much as possible before closing it away for storage, the rope lasted a reasonably long time. And used worn out rope was also a valuable commodity. Virtually all paper was made from old rope until some Canadian asshole figured out how to get fiber for paper out of wood chips. Our old friend Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, took the process to industrial scale and then cornered the market in wood pulp for his English newspapers but I digress.

The canvas is a different story, they couldn't do the tar process because of the added weight and the smaller coastal and fishing vessels developed a tanning process that turns the canvas a nice reddish brown, I'm sure you have all seen the sentimentalist pictures  in magazines.
Me, I'm wondering if that actually works, so yesterday I did an experiment. I didn't have any tanbark handy, so I went over to Lincoln High School and picked up a couple baggies full of green walnuts with husks still on. A bit awkward, me in my giant orange hazmat gloves, kids everywhere, but nobody seemed to mind me scurrying around the lawn gathering shit up.

Frozen husks from a dozen nut-balls. Need I say more?

 I did take the actual nuts out, a nasty business, there is so much tannin in the husks that they color everything it touches and I did remember to wear my hazmat gloves and I got away without much damage.
I did a bit of prep, washing the squares of canvas samples with Joy detergent, and dried them in the oven, and then boiled them an hour in an alum/baking soda pre-mordant fixative. Then dried again in the oven on low.

What a mess! Every time I checked the canvas sample the shit went all over the stove. I had a painters strainer bag left overt from when me and Terry were making hashish

Crowning achievement was a three hour boil with a screen-bag of husks, and when I was tired and absolutely bored I declared science satisfied and drained, rinsed and dried the sample.

I'm not perfectly satisfied with the colorIt is nice and brown, though. More mordant might help. Thanksgiving I'm going down to Mel and Jims in the Siskyou Mts and they say there's lots of oak trees and I can chop off some bark.I don't care so much about the color, as the effect on mildew.

Next is to fuck with the tar and the rope. Pine tar is quite stinky and so is turpentine, so I am a little  bit leery
of doing very much of this shit in my apartment, and then it has to dry and off-gas for a while so the tar gets dried out and wont get all over everything it touches, but I am notorious for, in the end, not really giving a shit about the niceties when science is to be served. I might be a queer but I'm no sissy...
We shall see.

EDIT: Nov 9th--Today I cut off a two inch wide satrip of this sample, got it quite wet but not dripping, put it in a baggie on the windowsill above the baseboard heater to see if it will mildew. I did the same to a piece of undyed plain canvas for a control. Check back later.