Today I want to share with you some lovely skeins of yarn dyed last summer, to both inspire myself and to inspire you if you’re tempted to give it a go!
These are solar dyes from last year, possibly the easiest, lowest input approach to dyeing, although perhaps not the quickest. What you can also see from this selection is just how you can achieve bright, clear and saturated the colours using this method.
Last year I shared the wonderful yellow I achieved with my early sunrise coreopsis which unfortunately did not really come back again this year so I’ll need to resow for next year, and also my first experiments with onion skins and with dock seeds, but I never got around to doing a round up of the last few experiments.
This year I have done very little dyeing, I’ve been held back by not having got around to winding skeins off my cones and mordanting the yarn. This is perhaps the least exciting part of the process and the winding into skeins can be avoided by buying ready skeined yarn if you have a good local supply. The mordanting is what helps the colours stick to the yarn making the light and wash fast and which brightens some of the colours you can achieve, so you really don’t want to stint here.
But anyway, lets look at what we have here in last years dyeing in the browns through to orange range:
From left to right we have oak galls, then alder cones, followed by dyers coreopsis exhaust over a grey hollyhock, finishing with the first bath dyers coreopsis on a clean alum mordanted skein.
Oak Galls
This was my first time dyeing with oak galls. We live in an area where a lot of different varieties of oak grow, from large deciduous oaks along the road to the evergreen holm oaks, the prickly leaved oaks of the hedgerows and cork oaks in older coppices. As a result I have good access to tannin rich oak galls, which are produced by the interaction of oak gall wasps and the plant itself. Here are some various stages of oak gall formation – I only collect them at the end of this process when the wasps have left the scene. While the colour may not be the most exciting, I love the slight variegation.
Alder Cones
The second skein was alder cones. I must admit to having hoped for a little more from these. Alder cones are something I don’t have easy access to and I came by the cones I used here in a carpark near Cortona. This was the start/finish point for a hike with our trekking group and I was excited to find them. This was in the spring so they were quite old by this point so while they still clearly had tannin, the colour was less pinky than I’d hoped. This skein was unmordanted to try and achieve the pink shade as mordanting with alum should produce a greener shade…
Dyers Coreopsis Exhaust
Having dyed the skein below, there was still lots of colour in the dye bath – dyers coreopsis really is quite intense and this was my first try with it. My first skein was so lovely that I decided to add this skein which had been part of a hollyhock experiment where later dips in the bath produced duller greys and browns, to liven it up. It certainly worked! This skein had been mordanted with alum and I love the almost rusty colour and that I was able to transform a rather underwhelming skein.
Dyer’s Coreopsis
This was a lovely experiment, my first time with Dyers coreopsis. I had spent 2 years trying to get the plants to grow to be able to harvest these flowers. I carefully dried them ensuring they were totally dry before storing them. Then I noticed that small moths had clearly laid eggs and little caterpillars were eating my flowers. I tried my best to remove them and then made the dye bath with what remained. Perhaps not the nicest experience all told but a great proof of concept, and I’ve been growing and harvesting flowers with much anticipation this year – and storing them more carefully!
Moving on to the second selection we have the yellows and greens, from left we have we have persimmon leaves, followed by brown walnut leaves, then brown sage and finally pink cosmos.
Persimmon leaf
I’ve used persimmon leaf before using the stove top method and loved the rich golden gingery tones that I achieved so want to try them using the solar method. Again I love this colour. I had collected the leaves in the autumn when they changed colour and stored them until the summer. The leaves on this tree turned a beautiful red before i collected them. I note this because not all of our different varieties of persimmon trees have leaves that colour so dramatically in autumn. Again this skein had been mordanted with alum.
Brown walnut leaves
I’ve dyed with walnuts, including walnut leaves before, and found that leaves collected as they began to fall in autumn when they were beginning to change colour gave a really vibrant gold. Last year however, I hadn’t collected many leaves in the autumn so thought I should try using older leaves to see it mattered that much when I collected them and whether the older brown leaves still had much colour to offer. It seemed they did. The colour isn’t as rich and vibrant as when I used younger leaves and the stove top method, but it’s still a good clear yellow. Again this skein had been mordanted with alum.
Brown Sage Leaves
I’ve seen some gorgeous green yellows achieved with sage in posts online so wanted to try it for myself. Also we have a lot of sage growing in the garden and every so often in the heat we experience some die back. So I used a period of dye back as the prompt to give it a try. It’s a good yellow, not as green as I might have liked but with shrivelled brown leaves I don’t think I can really complain.
I do want to try again this summer with some fresher sage as it needs cutting back again, and I’ll probably try again in the winter using the stovetop method to see how well that works with sage.
Pink Cosmos
Finally, we end with the biggest surprise and a note of caution. Orange and yellow cosmos are a recognised dye plant, but the mixed cosmos I grew flowered white, pink and red. I thought I’d collect the pink and red to see if they would dye similarly to the yellow/orange flowers which produce vibrant yellows and golds.
They didn’t.
The skein came out green. I’ve got green from dark coloured hollyhocks in the past and this is where the note of caution comes in.
These greens are regarded as unstable and unlikely to be colourfast. This is quite a complex issue involving a lot of chemistry and sources vary on their views on this. I’ve used a green yarn dyed with hollyhock in a project and am interested to see how stable it is in everyday use and I’ll probably do the same with this.
If I was dyeing for anything other than personal used I’d be doing lightfast tests and certainly we have sunlight here strong enough to bleach the colour out of fabrics dyed with synthetic dyes, but for my own use I want to see how the colours work in my knits as I wear and take care of them. Whilst it may be objectively sensible to test things in the harshest of conditions, I don’t subject my knits to that harshness so perhaps with that little extra care and attention I can enjoy some of these less stable colours in my projects. If they fade over time? Well, don’t we all a little, and shouldn’t we appreciate the opportunity of time and change?
Hopefully this post will give you some ideas and inspiration for your own dye experiments. I need to wind of some yarn into skeins and get it mordanting so I too can set up some solar dyeing jars. This year I’ve been producing lots of dyestuff rather than actually dyeing yarn and it’s about time that changed. There has to be some upsides to this ridiculous heatwave…
As always if you’ve tried any of these dyestuffs I’d love to know and if there’s anything you think I should try, Please leave a comment.
Happy knitting, dyeing or whatever crafting is fuelling your creativity just now.
Tess xxx
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