The jumper pattern I’ve chosen, the Afmaeli- 20 year anniversary sweater by Istex uses 9 different colours of yarn. I hope to reproduce this range using only natural dyes that are readily available to me without having to buy special dyestuffs.
So far my experiments have yielded 5 different colours. I described how I obtained the major brown colour and a blue yesterday and here are yesterdays successes (the colours aren’t quite right in the photograph):
1. Onion skins, alum mordant
2. Old tea, alum mordant
3. Eucalyptus leaves and twigs, alum mordant
4. Nettle tops, alum mordant
I’m very happy with the vivid orange that the onion skins gave, I used quite a high proportion of onion skins to yarn and there was still quite a bit of colour left in the bath although it was noticeably paler after the yarn was removed.
The tea dyed yarn gives the secondary colour for the jumper which is used around the cuffs, hem and neckline. I saved up the cold dregs from the teapot every time a new pot was made for about a week and had about 2.5 L in total. I wanted a very pale beige colour which I obtained by simmering the yarn in old tea until it was the desired colour.
I did not know what colour the eucalyptus would give and have seen reports of it giving anything from pinks and browns to bright greens. Since we have a tree in the garden though I picked a small branch and simmered the leaves and small twigs up to see what colour would result. I added a small piece of mordanted yarn to the pot to see what colour it would take up and since it came out a bright yellow I strained off the vegetable matter and added my skein.
The nettle dye was a bit last minute since ma came home with a bunch of nettles for me to try. I simmered them but the water only became a pale yellow colour. I decided to add the yarn while the nettles were still in the bath and simmer them together. After 30 mins, the yellow colour was still quite pale so I left the skein to cool in the bath overnight. When I took it out though there were black patches where the nettle had been in direct contact with the yarn. I will try to use this skein, overdyed with blue from beans to get a green colour since I already have a good yellow.
Here is a look at the skeins I have finished so far. The bottom skein is the eucalyptus and looks more yellow irl.
The remaining colours I hope to obtain are light green, blue-green, pink and purple. For the pink I have started preparing an avocado dye bath by soaking chopped avocado stones in water with 2 tsp ammonia added. I’ve read that a high pH is needed for best extraction of the colour from the avos. After just 24 hours of soaking it’s already a deep red colour! I hope that by overdyeing the pink with black bean juice I can get a decent purple.
For the light green I will overdye the nettle dyed yarn with black bean juice and for the blue-green I will dye a skein with black bean juice and then overdye with a yellow – possibly eucalyptus.
Nearly there! I will be knitting my tension square today – for the first time ever! I’m determined to do this properly!
The results of the onion skin experiment are shown below. The unmordanted skeins were a darker and duller shade of orange with a less yellow tone than the mordanted skeins.
mako makes stuff 