In the pot:

Goldenrod and Hydrangea after the simmering: (Hydrangea in the background)

The red flowers made this:

After being simmered to within an inch of their lives, the red flowers didn’t have much pigment or giddyup left. Kind of pathetic, actually. Oh, and I found the cheesecloth works great for straining out dyestuffs. Don’t try coffee filters unless you want to stand there forever.

Once the dye had been properly extracted from the dye stuffs, in went the alum and cream of tartar. I stirred it well, then stuffed in the wool, pre-soaked of course. Back onto the stove went the whole caboodle, and I had to distract myself for another half hour. Twiddle. Twiddle. Twiddle.

Here are the results.

Not very stunning, are they? Clockwise from the top left they are hydrangea (basically no color shift), first batch of goldenrod (some goldenish colored tips), the one dyed with red flowers is kind of hanging onto the bottom the goldenrod fleece. (You can barely tell in the photo, but it turned a pale rust in spots.) And a hopeful second batch of goldenrod (pale yellow in a few places). Not very exciting. Nor encouraging after an afternoon of work. Ah well. I got some experience out of it.

On reflecting, I think the main thing I did wrong was put the alum and cream of tartar in with the dye before adding the fiber. Some people can make this work, but others have trouble with the mordant adhering to the dye stuff and not the fiber, which gives you lovely colored water and untouched wool. From now on, I premordant. End of discussion. I also think I cooked the red too long.

Well, I’m battered but not crushed. I’ll be doing more in the future. And hopefully the near future.

Needless to say I promptly forgot about wool washing (although I did get the next batch in the degreaser) and switched to natural dyeing. You can imagine my excitement. A whole new world of discovery opened up! In two minutes flat I was picturing myself discovering an as yet untried dye stuff and bursting on the natural dyeing scene on Ravelry with an amazing revelation. My blog stats would soar, I’d walk on air for days . . . and I was getting carried away. I reeled myself back in and did the obvious. I picked the flowers.

I only had five flower heads to work with, not enough for a whole pot of dye, so I decided to put a glass jar in a larger pot of hot water and heat the dye that way. But one jar doesn’t take up the whole pot. I had room for two more jars. That meant that I got to come up with two other things to try! The goldenrod was a no-brainer, but I got stuck for the third. Then I thought about trying out hydrangea leaves and smashed one up to see what it did. It left nice yellow green stains on a paper towel so I picked about an ounce of leaves and trundled them inside.

I wound up leaving the flower heads in cold water to see if that affected the color any (and to float out any bugs that were hiding.) This didn’t seem to help color-wise, but I did get rid of some little white bug that could float.

I put my new mortar and pestle to use and smashed up the two fresh dyestuffs. Oh, and by the way, it worked superbly. I had to be very careful not to go on a “things to crush up” rampage. It was so much fun! But anyway, back to the dyeing.

The red flowers affected the water at once. As did the goldenrod. Here’s what it looked like.

The recipe I have calls for simmering the dyestuffs for 45 minutes to an hour. I obeyed, trying to distract myself so I wouldn’t hover over the pot…

(to be continued)

My conclusion is this: get over it and jump in. If there are so many ways to do it, and it works for all of those ways, there must be a pretty significant margin of error. I may not get the exact color I want, but I’ll most-likely wind up with something usable.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me explain what a mordant is. When you dye with natural dyes (bugs, plant juices, that sort of thing) you will need something to make the color permanent. Some dyes have this built in, but most plant juices need a little extra help. This is where (usually) natural dyeing becomes less natural and we bring on the chemicals. I’m using the “least toxic” mordants I can find. Alum Potassium (which comes in a white, powdery form and is sometimes used in chemical fertilizers) and its extra-special helper, Cream of Tartar. I don’t use the usual baking cream of tarter; I order it online in bulk. Well, “bulk” meaning a four-ounce jar. You can also use Tin, Chrome (very toxic!), and Copper . . . and there are a couple more that I can’t remember at the moment.

Mordant and Yarn

Anyhow, when you use a mordant, you somehow modify or change or re-group the molecular structure of something and it makes the color stick to the fiber and become “permanent.” You can either put the mordant and the dye in the same pot, then stick in the fiber, or you can cook the wool twice. Once in a pot with the mordant, and again in the pot of dye. I chose the latter method because it looked a little more controlled. I read about someone who tried to put the mordant in a cochineal bath, and the mordant stuck to the pigment but never grabbed the fiber. She wound up with nicely red water and a pale pink yarn. This is not really what I want to have happen. So, here I am mordanting.

If you can chill out about using potentially dangerous chemicals, it’s rather easy and enjoyable. First step, soak the yarn for at least a couple hours. Look at that! I broke the first rule and the day’s still young. I only soaked mine for one hour.

Cream Of Tartar Dissolving

I filled my biggest pot with room-temp water and pulled out a mason jar for dissolving the chemicals. It works best if you dissolve them in boiling water, then add them to the room-temp. This keeps them from clumping together and sticking to the yarn, and if you bring the whole pot up to boiling so you can add the chemicals you run the risk of shocking the poor little skien into a felted state. Not good.

So, now I’m waiting for the yarn to come to a simmer so I can simmer it for an hour. At that point, theoretically, the alum will have left the water and bonded with the fiber, so I can drain and rinse the yarn and hang it up somewhere to wait until Saturday’s dye party!