When I introduced this series of blog posts exploring my adventures in dyeing, I pledged to share with you my mistakes as well as my successes on the basis that we can learn from each others’ mistakes as well as our own.

It’s therefore quite ironic that it was just before the launch of the ‘new look’ Ravlery which meant that I could no longer use the site, that I discovered the Natural Dyeing Ravelry group.

In the group there was a thread on dyeing with orange day lilies, hemerocallis.

The original poster in that thread was in the US where it seems orange day lilies grow ‘wild’, or at least on roadsides and wasteland – how amazing is that! Here they need a little more active encouragement and we just have a couple of small ‘clumps’ in the garden.

The Ravelry poster kindly shared her experience: She collected half a bucket of flowers, covered them with boiling water and left them for about 24 hours before simmering the yarn in the solution for 1-2 hours. On 2 occasions following this method she got a lovely true orange colour and the third time, green. There was a discussion in the thread as to whether different levels of acidity from pollutants on roadside flowers would affect the colour. 

I looked a bit further and found quite a few references/statements that suggested that day lilies could be used as a dye material but few concrete examples. I’m a little suspicious of flower/petal dyes. Often flowers that look like they have a strong pigment/dye potential make ineffective dyes. However, I did find:

Journey to Sorontur who used spent flowers and got a strong, almost acid yellow on fibre.

and…

Judy of Judy’s Journal got a very similar colour on fabric