Search This Blog

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Adventures In Dyeing




 




Poke berries are poison. Do not eat. Do make a red (or purple or whatever color happens) dye. I got this idea from the book "A Weaver's Garden" by Rita Buchanan. She says berries need to ferment to give up their colors. The dye bath:

 
 
I'm annoyed with Blogger. It's all changed and I don't like to relearn. Anyway, the color is lovely, am I right? The scarf dyed with poke berries:


The fiber at the right was also dyed with poke berries but I added some pennys just to see what would happen. Kinda orangey.

So, the skein shown above is the original color of the scarf. You can see the line on the scarf where the color changes from the skeins dyeing a bit differently. Shame on me.

That yarn was on sale at 2 dollars a skein. It's Michael's Loops and Threads "Horizon Tweed
Thick and Thin Bulky Roving". I have more poke berries fermenting but don't have any more yarn!


Here we have walnuts after a 3 day soak and a 2 hour boil. I thought about cracking one open to see if they may be edible. Couldn't do it.


Here we have two pots of yarn and wool taking up the dye. With walnut splatters all about. I premordanted with alum. Each pound of fiber got 4 ounces of the mordant and was boiled for 1 hour.


And here in the dish pan we have the completed dye project. The color is so pretty. I enjoyed doing this!


This yarn was Lion Brand's Fisherman's Wool. The pink yarn on the left is also Fisherman's Wool but that was dyed with Wilton's Burgundy as well as some walnut dye. This idea came from Dye Your Yarn. She has formulas with all types of food dyes for sooo many kinds of color. Fun.

For the pink yarn I made a very long skein wrapping the Fisherman Wool around our swing outside. A pic:



The yarn was draped into 3 dye pots, 2 walnut and the pink was in the middle. I seemed to have forgotten to take a picture, silly me. It was left to simmer 1 hour and was not mordanted. Though a bit vinegar was used for the food coloring. Another picture of the Wilton Burgundy dyed Fisherman's Wool:
 
 
 
 
Well, I hope you enjoyed viewing my little dyeing adventure! Thanks for stopping by.