Even more natural dyeing

What I love most about rhubarb is definitely eating it, but the colour the leaves give is nice as well. I'm looking forward to using the whole plant when the time for rhubarb jam and cobbler comes next year. 

I've taken to calling this project "fifty shades of yellow". (Because I am a little bitter about it, I like neither the book series or yellows, at all.) But the strong colours that the turmeric dye gave, are nice enough that it's hard to completely hate them. 

I am planning to try carrot dye once more. This is the result of dyeing with the water used to boil five-six carrots. Next time I'm using a lot of carrot shavings, and I will let the dye sit on the heat for an hour, like I normally do. (But seeing as the yarn was snow white before I put it in the dye, it's not a total loss.) 

How do I explain this colour without sounding crazy? I boil my taters with some rosemary, because that turns into noms. One day I forgot about it and would have ended up with fried potatoes if I hadn't remembered in time. The taters were saved, but when I took them out of the water I noticed that the water was really brown. So I put in some alun and a small skein of yarn. For science. Of course it ended up... yellowish.

And some cheating.  I found another bottle of food dye. But not yellow, yay! 

I set up a rule, that I was not to use foodstuffs that could be consumed, for dye. And even so, I wanted to use coffee for dyeing. So this is coffee that's already been used, and collected over a few days in the freezer before being made into dye. Since the coffee bean is technically a berry, I set the colour with salt and not alun. 

I found some curry that should have been used before 2009 in the back of a cupboard, and instead of throwing it away I used it as dye. 

When I was younger, I used visit my grandparents a lot. We'd go up in the mountains and pick berries in fall. One of the things I'd insist on making was blueberry ... Since I was the only one who liked it, the bottles would just collect over the years, and we still have some left, so I took a bottle from 2005, and used it as dye. 

I've been told that blueberry dye isn't very colourfast, so I've hung up one of the skeins in a window to see if it fades. After a week it holds up quite well - but then again, we haven't had much sun either! (Oh, the joys of living above the polar circle.)

Plant dyeing (and more)

Heather turned into a fantastic golden yellow on white yarn, and took on a greenish hue on undyed grey yarn. I was thrilled. My camera refuses to capture the colours in all their magnificence, but you get the gist. 

Dyed and undyed yarn for a side by side comparison.

Even though I'd ended up with a colour that wasn't yellow, I still felt like experimenting, and remembered I had some useless food colouring lying around. I used vinegar as a fixative.

The colours are a bit bolder in person.

And then over to plant dyes again - powdered paprica. The colour turned out a nice orange, but not as deep as I'd expected. 

And here's a picture of all the colours I've made so far. I love how the golden heather yarn pops forth here (left, under the blue).

Plant dyeing

The first time I tried plant dyeing, the result was somehow disappointing. During Easter, I tried to dye the same shirt a deeper red, with red beets. Didn't work that either.

But third time's the charm, so when I sat with large amounts of strawberries, I decided to try again. And having read more about dyeing, this time I used wool, since linen is one of the harder materials to dye.

One of my mistakes from last time was that I let the fabric lie in a cold dyebath. Now I let the yarn simmer lightly for an hour. Since this was berry dye, I used salt as a fixative.

When the strawberry dye worked out fine, I couldn't stop there. I gathered some fireweed and bought alum to use as a fixative. I didn't think the dye bath would smell very good, but it filled the house with the scent of rhubarb jam. A few people were disappointed when they realised what I was cooking wasn't edible. And the colour turned out an amazing neon yellow!

Look who finally caved and got instagram.
I am sewimpossible, for those who wanna stalk.

I did a lot of research, got a dye vat and biked out to the mountains to gather plants to use.

I  found a tiny friend sitting on the porch of our cabin.

Gah I love ferns.

Yellow:  ferns. Beige: birch bark.

So I used the ferns, and... wasn't this supposed to be reddish brown? And the birch bark ended up as a pale beige, maybe because I only used bark from dead trees. But the colour you end up with depends on the mordant used, so maybe I should have used an iron mordant to get the darker colours I'd seen online.

Dandelion roots.

I was a bit tired of yellow, so I did more research, focusing on plants I could find in Norway, that were easy to find and most importantly, don't yield yellow dye!

Pale yellow: spinach. Pale brownish beige: dandelion roots.

I got spinach from the store and ruthlessly dug up dandelion roots from the garden. The colours I expected were green and brown, but no. So I'm making an iron mordant with a few rusty nails in vinegar, and when it's finished brewing in a week or two, I'm trying again.