Sunday, June 29

Some things are not what you expect!!

From this......The lovely lavender geraniums that I have all over to this.....
The color started out a nice hot pink in the beginning and then went to this. I would say its a burn orange in liquid form. So I put some roving in some small jars that I had pre mordant with alum and cream of tarter and what did I get????

I would describe the colors as golden honey, the darker one which was coopworth roving and the lighter one as blonde mink. That roving was merino superwash. Both started out natural. The lighter one is shaded quite a bit, not sure if you can see it really in the pictures but its there. I have to say I LOVE both colors but certainly not what I thought I would get from lavender geraniums. But that's the beauty of natural dyeing you just never know. And the dyeing was done solar!! The mordant was done on the stove though. I have many of these plants so I think I am going to do a very large dye pot of this in the near future. I really have to get much more and much larger dye pots. This dyeing is just way toooooooo much fun!!
On a funny note.. My poor DH the other day says to me ....You know when I came home from work I opened the fridge and freaked out. Why i asked?? I was at work when he came home. Because he said, I saw this big bowl and it was red inside and I had to open it to see what was in there. I looked at him kind of strangely and said why, its just cut up watermelon. Then he says yeah I saw but I thought it was .... YARN!! I thought you had one of your concoctions in the fridge!!! LOL Can you imagine??? That's bad when your family is expecting to see a dye concoction and yarn in the fridge and it wouldn't surprise them!! But they encourage my fiber adventures and never give me a hard time about it.
Right now I have worsted weight in logwood purple with tin mordant on the stove cooling and then in a few days I will add the indigo to the urine vat. My DH was nice enough to contribute every morning to help the cause, though he thinks that's a bit nasty as he says. And I have some small jars of roving the was pre mordanted in alum/cream of tarter in marigold dye liquid. The marigolds gave of a weak yellow so we shall see. The sage yuck threw it out, the primrose really the same as the marigold, the stella di orio lily not so good and the creopsis an orange but then again who knows. I have tiger lily in a jar and its a lovely orange, and my red lily's cant remember the name of them and that is a strange color. Kind of red orange. I am still collecting flowers for the lily dyes and leaving them in the sun, we shall see. So that is my dyeing adventures so far.
Have to go, the dye pots are calling me!!!

1 comment:

Robyn said...

go for the weeds... they try harder to please...