It's been ages again hasn't it? It's all been a bit frenzied here recently, with the kids' schools doing stuff and so on. But today for the first time in ages I fancied doing a bit of dyeing. Come to think of it, it's the first time in ages that I've had the time! Part of it is that Miss M is away on a residential thing with her gymnastics club, and the gentlemen of the family were going to build a shed for my mother-in-law (well, put together a shed, it was a flatpack thing) so this afternoon I had an unusually quiet Saturday afternoon stretching before me. One thing I wanted to do was dig up the docken sprouting in the front garden, and then it occurred to me that it would be nice to try dyeing with it.
With a quick look at Wild Colour (one of Jenny Dean's books) and a bit of googling, I found out that the tap root can be used for dyeing, but I fancied just trying the leaves. Of course when I dug the flaming thing up I realised that the tap root is enormous! In fact I bent my trowel trying to lever it up..
So I've saved the taproot and will try it another time.
There were loads of leaves so after a bit of leisurely winding of wool into skeins and a bit of mordanting, I got to the dyeing bit. The end colour was a pleasant enough soft yellow but I fancied messing around with an alkaline modifier and as luck would have it there was a bag of soda crystals in the cupboard under the sink. I draped half of the skein into the modifier and it turned a more mustardy yellow. It's not the most gorgeous colour really, but I really like the two tone effect and I'm looking forward to knitting it up and seeing how it looks!
I had a second smaller skein mordanted so I had a go at dyeing with fuchsia bark, mainly because I hacked back the Fuchsia of Doom a few weeks ago and had loads of twigs/sticks left from it with lovely soft papery outer bark. Note to Self of the Future though, it gives beige, don't bother again! So I chucked in some alchemilla mollis leaves and flowers to simmer with the wool, and got another yellow:
That's it still damp and drip drying on the handle of the back door to the garage so I'll have to check the colour properly tomorrow morning.
So it's been a day that has been both lazy and productive - pretty good!
2 comments:
Lazy AND productive is definitely good!
Another bloggy friend (Snowcatcher) has dyed with dock (and lots of other plants). She seemed to get a lot of yellow shades too. Your results are pleasantly soft and sunny! I see a pretty shawl there.
Hello missus, nice to 'see' you again! Most things seem to give yellow, if they don't give beige, but I've been looking at the number of yellows I've got so far and there's such a variety within just 'yellow'. A shawl is a great idea! I hadn't considered that before because I dye in small quantities, usually 50g or less at a time (that two-tone one is 37g of 4-ply), but I could easily do stripes of related yellows, that could be interesting!
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