kaynoxxcrafts:

Some of you might remember my ‘solar dyeing’ post from the summer where I tried dyeing with natural materials – this resulted in middling results… I had 3 skeins of yarn and I used turmeric, matcha and avocado and rose petals to attempt to dye the skeins. 

The turmeric and matcha just… didnt result in much color change. The turmeric, specifically, was the biggest let-down. It came out a beautiful and bright yellow but after about half an hour of drying, it completely lost it’s color – take a look at the skein on the far right of the left picture, that’s how it looked. The matcha didnt have any color change at all. The avocado and rose petal skein turned a tea color but the smell from that one was so pungent I actually threw it away because no amount of washing could get it out. 

So I decided to try again, but with a little more science involved. 

After a fair amount of research, I realized I needed to do a few extra steps to make this work: the skeins needed to be scoured, they needed tannin, they needed a mordant, and only then could you dye them. (yikes)

So first, I scoured them with some dawn dish detergent and baking soda. It’s recommended that you use synthrapol and heat it but that stuff scares me with the amount of WARNING: CANCER labels that are on it – and dawn basically does the same thing. 

So, the tannin: this is basically the thing that makes the mordant ‘stick’ to the yarn. 

I calculated that I had 293g of yarn, and I need 8% tannin (24g) and it needed to be heated to just under boiling and kept at that heat for about 2 hours. It smelled kinda like tea and left the skeins looking slightly darker than they were before.

I didnt get a pic because I did the mordanting right after. 

I used Alum Acetate  (8%) and, again, it needed to soak for about 2 hours – this time it just needed hot water, no boiling. 

At this point, it’s already 8pm (I started all this after work) so I decided to leave the skeins to dry in the laundry room and finish the next day – it’s a good thing I put then so far away because apparently, they STINK at this point. 

The mordanting, by the way is to help the dye ‘stick’ to the yarn. And it needed to be fixed to the yarn by using phosphates. I didnt have the recommended kind, but after some more research, I found out that you can use wheat bran as a substitute – so I dissolved it into some water and soaked it for a bit. 

Now onto the actual dyeing. I decided on madder root for my dye – which should provide a lovely dark, deep red. It needed hard water, so I chucked an antacid into the water to help it get to the right levels, and finally dyed my yarn. 

It took about 4 hours. 

I did 2 skeins first so I could get a 50%-ish dye-to-yarn ratio for a darker red, and the last 2 skeins got put in after and soaked up the rest. 

In the picture, you can see the 2 on the left are the first batch. They turned out more or less how I imagined – I do wish they were a little darker. I only got 100g of madder because I thought that would be enough but apparently, you need quite a bit of the stuff to make it really dark. Oh well. 

The last 2 skeins turned a sort of coral color. I dont mind it at all – those were my ‘afterthought’ skeins. 

Some glitches: 

1. the wheat bran was a BAD idea – this stuff was IMPOSSIBLE to wash out and after 6 (SIX) rinses it was still coming out of the skeins. It took drying, shaking, and re-skeining to get the flakes of bran out. and I think there’s still a bunch in there. 

2. As I mentioned, I didnt have enough madder to really get the color I wanted – I wish I had done ALL the calculations before getting my materials (my fault tho)

3. I definitely didnt expect the whole process to take SO DAMN LONG. 1 hour to scour, 2 for tannin, 2 for mordanting, 4 for dyeing and about 1-2 for rinsing/washing. It’s…. a time commitment, I’ll tell ya. 

In the end, I got somewhat of the right color I was hoping for. I’ll be using it to finish off my crochet waistcoat. And it was a huge learning opportunity, so that was cool. 

But was it worth it? Absolutely not. Maybe if I was mordanting 10-20 skeins at a time to use later, it would be worth the time commitment – but holy hell is it a lot of work. 

Will I do this again? Probably not. I mean, I can use acid dye, get a much bigger array of vibrant colors and it will take a fraction of the time. The natural dyes do give really lovely earthy colors – which is why I did this in the first place, but it’s just not worth it for me. 

Thanks for sticking around long enough to read all this! I’ll be using this yarn soon so you can see it in action.