And the house smelled like Gin...
Juniper berry dye!
I bought the juniper berries at cost plus. The yarn is a 50% wool/50%silk blend.
My youngest son and I took turns crushing the juniper berries with the mortar and pestle.
Here is the dyestuffs boiling away in the dye pot. The recipe said to really boil the heck out of it, so we did.
Not shown: draining off the dye liquid, placing wool/silk fibers in newly strained dye bath, boiling again for 1/2 hour. Removing yarn from dye bath. Being verra surprised at the resultant greenish color (green? was expecting brownish yellow. Huh.) Placed dyed yarn in iron modifier, resulting in a deeper, darker green. Ok then.
So in the middle is the dark green yarn drying in the sun. (On the right is some 100% wool yarn that I removed from its indigo/stale urine dye bath (stanks!) Please to be disregarding it for now - I'll write up details about that dye another time:)
I threw a piece of white silk that had been mordanted with alum into the juniper dye bath to see if that would produce a different color. Nope, green as well. Modified it with iron. Still green, but a different shade of green. The silk is shown at the far left.
Fun!
I bought the juniper berries at cost plus. The yarn is a 50% wool/50%silk blend.
My youngest son and I took turns crushing the juniper berries with the mortar and pestle.
Here is the dyestuffs boiling away in the dye pot. The recipe said to really boil the heck out of it, so we did.
Not shown: draining off the dye liquid, placing wool/silk fibers in newly strained dye bath, boiling again for 1/2 hour. Removing yarn from dye bath. Being verra surprised at the resultant greenish color (green? was expecting brownish yellow. Huh.) Placed dyed yarn in iron modifier, resulting in a deeper, darker green. Ok then.
So in the middle is the dark green yarn drying in the sun. (On the right is some 100% wool yarn that I removed from its indigo/stale urine dye bath (stanks!) Please to be disregarding it for now - I'll write up details about that dye another time:)
I threw a piece of white silk that had been mordanted with alum into the juniper dye bath to see if that would produce a different color. Nope, green as well. Modified it with iron. Still green, but a different shade of green. The silk is shown at the far left.
Fun!