Over the last few days I have been exploring the potential of dyeing yarn with irises. There are several post I found online and I very helpful thread on rav that I found, but I wanted to explore the option further. What I did learn, though, is that purple flowers typically dye green. That is SO not fair. I love green, but those purples are seductive! Also wool and irises are not the best of friends. I saw more success with silks and plant fibers. Finally, the color may not be light or wash fast. Okay, not super great news all around. But, like a terrible scientist, I started my experiment before I did the background research. I was just too excited.
So the flowers are not exactly stolen. I mean, they weren't ours exactly. They belong to our neighbors to the north and they are fantastic people. They were headed out of town a few weeks ago to do volunteer doctoring in Haiti (see... fantastic people!) and told us to cut some irises to bring into our house since they were probably going to dye off while they were gone. Free, fresh cut irises in our house? Don't mind if I do!
Anyone who has ever had irises, cut or in their garden, probably know that dark purple "ink" liquid that they secrete when they are dying. Our cut flowers kept dripping this dark purple liquid on the table and counters and my husband was convinced that this would make a great yarn dye. I love that his thoughts went there immediately when he saw the purple stuff from flowers. Then he bugged me for a few days to try it. Seriously, he was very encouraging and excited about it. So cute!
Okay, so I collected a bunch of nearly dead flower heads. These seem to be optimal for purple colored liquid based on my very scientific method of picking flowers at various staged of life and squishing them between my fingers. Obviously I wasn't going to take the ones in full bloom. But once they start dying they curl inward. I think the best time to collect them is when the have turned into little pods, but if they get too far gone they lose the purple color. When I squished these I only got brown goo. Nope!
I don't want to use any heat for this dye. I saw from using the purple petunias that the dye turns green with heat. So I cut off the green bases of the flowers, used the butt end of a knife to smash the purple out of the flowers and added enough room temp water to cover the flowers. Then I left them on a sunny window sill. After a few hours (I got impatient, not the best of traits in natural dyeing) I took out about a tablespoon of the purple liquid and added it to a jar I have set aside just for dyeing. (Never used dye equipment for food!). I had a mini skein of non-superwash worsted merino that I had mordanted with alum earlier that morning still in the alum water on the stove. So lazily a just poured the mordant water into the jar. And look at the color difference! The alum in the water turned it blue!
Okay okay okay... something very cool just happened! And I was determined to reproduce that observation to try and understand what happened. But before I get into that, lets talk about the yarn. I added the yarn to the jar, as you can see. I am not heating it. I was hoping to let it soak up some beautiful Colorado sunshine, but it's rather cloudy today. *sad face*. I am planning on leaving the yarn in the blue water for at least 4 days. Perhaps with some gentle heating here and there. So far, after about 12 hours in the blue, the results are mixed. I took a picture of the amazing color of the yarn just out of the jar. Can you see the blue color? It is so exciting.
Then I rinsed it to see how much color was actually taking. I took a video. (sorry about the vertical video! It was before coffee)
As you can see, most of the color is rinsing out. But there is a hint of color retained in the yarn. It is a lovely minty blue/green that is nearly impossible to capture on camera unfortunately. Encouragement! The yarn is capable of being dyed using irises! Its is encouraging me to keep going. Besides, we have lived with jars are avocado pits on our window sill for the better part of a year. We have handle yarn in lovely blue water for a week or so.
But here is the part I really like! I mean, I love that I have gotten color on the yarn. And I'll update this blog in a week or so with the results. Then I'll leave the a portion on the yarn in the sun to test the fastness of the color. BUT... I wanted to test water chemistry on dye bath color using the thing that most home natural dyers are aware of and try to control, pH. I used an eyedropper to extract a little bit of purple from the soaking flowers. Then I added a few drops of vinager and the color changed from purple to bright pink! I did the same but used a few drops of ammonia. The color change to green was dramatic! I wish I had caught it on video. it was amazing. Then I wanted to figure out if the alum in the water changed the color to blue. So I added a tiny bit of alum to the purple dye and it turned BLUE BLUE BLUE! Lovely lovely wonderful blue. Here are the colors as absorbed on paper towels. From top and working clockwise- Alum added (blue), Ammonia added (Green), Nothing added (purple) and Vinegar added (hot pink). All from Irises! Isn't that AMAZING!!!! I think I stared at this for minutes with my mouth agape. So cool!
One final thing one this. So this morning, after 12 hours or so, here is what the same test paper towels look like. The ammonia-added green is gone! The vinegar is there, but faded. The original purple is as dark as it ever was and the alum-added blue broke into blue and green. Not sure what this means for mordanted wool, but hopefully we'll find out!
