Confession: My first dyeing love is using natural dyes. I have spent hours reading all the post about natural dyeing on ravelry, two to three times each. I even took notes. And I have spent a ton of time collecting flower heads and avocado pits and skins and storing them in the freezer for months (going on a year really). I even have jars of chopped up avocado pits soaking in ammonia and water on the window sill in the kitchen pretty much continuously. I broke down and bought madder root too. I was seduced by the oranges and reds but didn't want to wait the three years it took to grow my own.
My latest dye experiments, and make no mistake, they are always experiments, resulted in a beautiful pale pink from avocado pits! I used one of the jars of avocado pits and my kitchen smelled... well...interesting... all day yesterday. And the color of the water was SO dark. Like nearly black. I was so excited about the amount of color. Dark pink, here I come! My inlaws are in town so they got to enjoy the, shall we say, aroma too! They may have thought I was a bit nutty but they were nice enough to refrain from judgement until they saw the colors.
I already had the skein of lace weight merino pre-mordanted with alum. So the alum is like a pre-treatment. The yarn soaks in a heated alum bath and the alum, which is a common kitchen thing used in pickling, prior to dyeing and it helps the dye bind to the yarn. Without it the yarn make take the dye, but it won't be as excited about it and it the color may not be as wash or light fast. So anyway, I put this skein in a crock-pot (my spell check wants to change that to crack-pot. I am a fan of my spell check) with the drained soak water from the pits and heated it up to a gentle simmer for about an hour (or so). Then I turned off the heat and let it alone until today. And then the rinsing began. I tried to conserve water, I really did. But no one wants a skein of yarn smelling like avocado pits and ammonia! So I rinsed like 100 times. And viola, light pink. Even after that saturated color of the dye bath... But I am thrilled with the pink I did get. It is a wonderful old lady pink. But not a crazy cat lady; a sophisticated old rich widow pink. aka- not the kind of old lady I'll be.
The second prepped skein of SW merino lace weight I dyed with the remainder of the flowers I'd collected from my gardens last summer. I had already used the yellow flowers for a skein a month ago that ended up a to-die-for golden yellow color. I just wanted to eat it it was so gorgeous. The purple petunias were such a lovely deep purple that I just had to try them as a dye color. I won't lie, I was hoping for purple. And I got a fantastically earthy green. Dyeing with flowers is fairly simple. You boil the dye stuff (flowers, leaves, roots, whatever it may be) in water for about an hour. Generally you can tell with the color has been extracted from something like flowers. Then you strain out the material use this colored water as your dye. Add the yarn and bring up to a simmer or boil depending on who you listen to. I kept the yellow flowers in the dye bath with the yarn, so the yellow is very variegated ranging from a bright sunshine to a deep mustard where the flowers were in contact with the wool. While I was a bit disappointing with not getting a purple, it was a long shot anyway. I mean, look at that combo. It's so earthy and happy at the same time, like one of those super bubbly hippies who have found enlightenment and you want to punch in the face.
