Dyeing is FUN!

Yesterday we had some vegetable dyeing experiments with white and grey wool yarns with Elzebeth and Sahra. I didn’t remember how fun it is to do vegetable dyeing. It has been beyond over ten years I have tried it last time. We had dried tansy flowers, fresh lupin (which has arrived to Europe about 1800s and is not medieval... but gives interesting colour), dried carrot greens and onion peelings. Before starting our experiment we soaked the vegetables in water overnight. Then we used alum for pre-mordant the yarns before dyeing. The tansy and carrot greens yarns turned out yellow and somewhat similar looking, lupin yarns was light green (very beautiful) and onion peelings yarns orange. And if I remember right, after dyeing once we put some iron sulfate to the tansy and carrot greens water to make the colour more like green and made second dyeing. I haven’t seen the results of second dyeing yet because we had to leave to home before the yarns was washed after dyeing. I will get the yarns after two weeks when I see Elzebeth next time. It was very hard to take pictures about the colours because the camera makes the colours look different than they are.

Yarns in alum water

Beautiful lupin yarns coming..

That's not spaghetti... :D it's onion yarns

Result from the first dyeing

We had other reasons to visit Elzebeth also. She is going to make the food for our wedding. We actually have almost complete list of foods that we are going to have... and it’s little bit over a year now before the big day. Of course something might change but the main things we know now. One of the reasons for planning the foodstuff this early was that we are going to make several liqueurs and other beverages to the wedding. That means we have to pick different kinds of vegetables, berries etc. this spring and summer. Hmm... I should pick nettles also just in case I need some :D.