I have collected a huge number of natural dyes already, that are all waiting for their day in the dye pot:
- onion skins (brown and red ones, collected over many months in my kitchen)
- birch leaves (collected on midsummer day in 2013)
- madder (bought)
- myrtus leaves (bought)
- alcea rosea (collected during walks through Zurich, they grow everywhere here)
- sandal wood (bought)
- annatto (collected myself in brazil)
- reed blossoms (collected in 2014 in the park of my university)
- cochineal (bought as an "easter egg dye")
- (probably more than I remember now!)
Unfortunately I could never find time to use them. This weekend I just felt like this summer I should change that and at least try some of my natural dyes :)
I started by using reed blossoms which I collected last year together with my boyfriend in the park around my university.
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| me collecting reed blossoms in August 2014 |
I am a bit short on time usually and a bit lazy ;-) So I used the following heavily modified version of a recipe found in the book "Naturfarben auf Wolle und Seide" by Dorothea Fischer.
Ingredients
- 30 g of dried reed blossoms
- 100 g of sock yarn (Bluefaced Leicester 75%, Nylon 25%)
- 15 g of alum
- 1.5 teaspoons of iron sulfate
- 2 pots (a small one for about 1-2 liters and a larger one for about 5 liters)
- piece of cloth to tie the plant material in plus an old hairband or a piece of string.
Mordanting
dissolved the alum in a bit of hot water, added more cool water and the yarn, so that it was just covered. Heated and let simmer for about 30 min. This I did in the larger pot!
Preparing the Dye Plant
This can be done at the same time as the mordanting.
Cut the reed flowers into small pieces using scissors. Put the plants into the smaller pot and added water to cover, heated and let simmer for about 30 min. Then I filtered the mixture through a piece of cloth, letting the liquid run directly into the larger pot (where the yarn-mordant mixture is). The cloth was tied together with an old hairband and also placed in the larger pot.
Dyeing
Many recipes will tell you now to simmer the yarn for one hour, then taking it out and putting a second skein intho the bath which will again stay for one hour and get a lighter color. I don't like pastel colors so much, I want strong colors. As my dyebath already has quite a low content of dyeing material (30%, most recipes take 100%), I wanted to let that skein in as long as possible to exhaust all the dye it can...
I let the yarn simmer on low heat for about 1 hour, then I switched off the heat and left the mixture stand over night. On the next day, I turned it on again and let it simmer on low heat for about 2-3 hours. Sometimes I added more water to cover the yarn completely.
During this time you don't need to watch the pot, you can easily clean the house, go to the post office, grocery shopping, etc ;-)
Color Modification with Iron Sulfate
I took out the skein and placed it in a strainer over a pot (the smaller pot from the beginning). I removed the bag with the tied dye plants and added about 1.5 teaspoons of iron sulfate to the mixture. Then I let hang half of the skein into the dye pot, keeping the other half in the strainer.
The half in the pot will now get a darker color giving a two-colored semisolid skein :)
After simmering for about 30 min, the skein was removed from the pot. Be careful that the color modified part, does not touch the unmodified part because this can give stains!
After letting the skein cool a bit on the strainer it was rinsed with warm water, washed with a mild fiber soap and further rinsed until the water stayed clear.
Let it dry... and tadaaa: Isn't it wonderful? You can see the lighter green, which is the unmodified color of the reed blosssoms and the darker green modified by the iron sulfate.
Here is the skein together with some other plant dyes yarns I did before in similar methods:
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| left to right: two solar dyed skeins (multicolor yellow-orange-pink), reed blossoms (green), privet berries (petrol), dahlia flowers (bright orange). |
I hope to be able to show you more natural colors this upcoming summer! :)
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