A good day to dye

Last fall, my friend Annette invited me over to do some natural dyeing. I was intrigued, and that visit really sparked my interest. I liked the idea of using foraged or repurposed materials to dye my yarn, and I also liked the idea of turning my pile of white handspun into something more appealing (the Breed School 2.0 experience was too monochromatic for me!). So yesterday, I started with this:

That's about two pounds of undyed yarn, all handspun except for one skein I picked up from the half-price pile at HipStrings a couple weeks ago (at SVFF). 

Natural dyes can be quite muted, and I knew I wanted to get colors as intense as possible. So this year, I took the time to mordant my yarn in advance. I used the most commonly used mordant, alum, which helps dye bond to the fiber. It also helps improve colorfastness. Most of the mordanting instructions say to heat the yarn in the mordant solution, but I chose to use the cold mordant method. It takes longer, but requires less monitoring...just the ticket for my life! On Saturday morning, I put all my yarn to soak in water. Saturday evening, I moved it into another bucket with dissolved alum, dissolved cream of tartar (which serves as an "assistant" and increases the amount of alum absorbed by the wool), and cool water. I used 12% alum and 6% cream of tartar. That sat overnight. I rinsed it Sunday morning, and took the wet skeins to Annette's, along with the plant material I had collected over the summer. I had bags of dandelion flowers and marigold flowers from my freezer, as well as some onion skins from the kitchen.

Annette had a variety of naturally-dyed skeins on display for inspiration as we got started. Aren't these lovely?

The first thing we did was build a "rainbow dye pot," which is a technique we read about in the Spring 2021 issue of Spin-Off magazine. With this technique, you build a layered casserole of dyestuff and fiber in the dyepot, and add minimal water (so that the fiber doesn't float or swim around). Rather than mixing the dyestuffs, we piled them in the pot so there would be distinct areas of color. We used black walnut, madder, annatto, marigold, onion skin, and dandelion in this pot. Between each layer of dyestuff is a layer of fiber encased in cheesecloth. Somehow I neglected to photograph the pot as we were building it, but here's what it looked like in the end:

Here's how it looked after removing the top layer of dyestuff. Annette put some washed (but otherwise unprocessed) fiber into those little mesh bags, while my contribution to this pot was a variety of mini skeins.

The deeper we went into the pot, the hotter it got. These heat-proof gloves became important. Here's an action shot of the unpacking:

And here is how my little skeins look after drying. They are pleasingly variegated!

With this method, you can sometimes tell exactly what dyestuff was where. This dark brown spot was certainly touching a black walnut:

We couldn't help but notice that the water in the dyepot was still quite deeply colored, so we threw some more fiber in for a second round. In this round, everything was mixed and more water was added, so there isn't much variegation. I got a pleasingly orange skein, though! This is Rambouillet:

We dyed some skeins with black walnut, too. I know most people find the fallen husks to be a nuisance, but if you soak them for a few days, they make a really nice dye. The top skein is just black walnut dye, while the next one has some iron added to shift the color to a lovely gray with an olive undertone:

Finally, the flower pots. The dandelions weren't very intense on their own (I could have used more flowers, or added a modifier to shift the color). Still, it's a pleasant light yellow:

And here is my favorite skein, the marigold one. This had quite a lot of flowers in it and also a bit of tin to shift the color. It is a glorious, glowing orange!

We had a lovely day, slowly moving dyes and yarns around, and chatting about all things fiber. Here are my 5 finished big skeins all together. They look harmonious, don't they?

I'm already thinking about what to do next time. I still have some undyed skeins, and I've been collecting avocado pits and peels. I also have a bag of black walnuts in the garage. So there will be more of this!