Fun with natural dyes

The colors on my pics and on the screen aren't quite right (not rich enough), but it still conveys a lot.

This is my share of the dyed goods from a natural dyeing session I did with some friends last weekend.

My skeins are wool, roughly 100g each, roughly fingering weight.  My friends had their own skeins along with some pieces of fabric in wool and in linen.  It totaled up to I don't know how many pounds/kilograms of stuff.

The wool was mordanted a few weeks ago with alum and cream of tartar.  We weren't hugely consistent in our mordanting technique, as I wrote about in a recent post.  But as you can see, everything took the dye quite well.  The linen, since it wasn't mordanted, was destined for the indigo pots.

The yellow is from marigolds.  One of the group grew marigolds last summer and froze a bunch of flowers.  The dye was extracted with a long simmer and the petals strained out.

We weren't too careful in our dyeing technique.  Mostly, people wetted the yarn/fabric, dropped it in the pot, stirred it a bit, then after a little while took it out, wrung out excess dye, and hung it up to dry.  Then someone else would put something in the pot, etc.

Much later, after we got our stuff home, everything was rinsed.

Anyway, the first yellow that came out of the marigolds was a rich color -- sort of a bronze-y mustard-y russet-y yellow.

Mine is more of a lemon/banana yellow.  Later things dyed were even lighter yellows.  We didn't do any ammonia/water afterdips (or any post-mordanting, or anything at all, really) to modify colors.

The oranges are madder.  We meant to add calcium but forgot, so ended up with more orange than red, though one of my skeins (which was in the dyebath longer) has some areas that are more red.

The blues are all indigo, though the lightest one (next to the orange madder skeins) was dyed light yellow before it had a quick dip in the indigo.

I was trying for an indigo gradient, both with repeated dips (for darker colors), and quicker dips, and dips at various portions of the afternoon, in hopes that lighter colors would happen as the indigo got exhausted.  Well, it never really got exhausted, apparently!  We used indigo extract and will take that into account for our next dye day.  Ditto for the madder pot, which also used extract rather than us prepping whole roots, and which was still giving excellent color all the way through the day.

I wonder if part of why the indigo hit so quickly and well was due to the skeins being mordanted?  Dunno if that makes a difference for indigo.

We will probably get together again for more dye days, both natural and synthetic dyes.  We're also considering a weed walk, where we go after invasive/noxious weeds and plentiful non-noxious weeds to acquire materials for our dyepots.  We'd still use indigo and madder extracts, but we should be able to get a range of yellows and browns and russets/olives etc. from the local flora.  We'll see.

Rinsing off was rather messy.  I still have indigo on my fingernails since I wasn't wearing gloves when I rinsed them.  I did wear them during the dyeing.

I'm not sure what I'll do with my dyed yarn.  Tablet weaving, maybe?  Or other weaving?  Give them away to friends?  Dunno.  One of them (not pictured above) already went home with one of the other dyers, since that person has some Ideas of Things To Try..

Anyway, much fun was had.  It's been a long time since I've done much natural dyeing.  It's always more fun to do dyeing with friends.