Natural dyeing

 Ive been going to learn to natural dye for years but its such a time consuming process so Ive just avoided it.. But now I have so many little skeins from my fibre breed study so I thought why not use the purple cabbage that I bought that was sitting in my crisper & probably never to be eaten as my first dye experiment.

So I chopped up and boiled the cabbage until almost all of the cabbage had no colour left in it.

I strained the water and then the next day I added some little skeins to the water and turned the pot up to get the water simmering but not boiling. 

I probably let it simmer for about an hour then let it cool before taking out the yarns & rinsing and soaking them in some laundry liquid to get out the veggie smell.

I didnt use any mordant on the yarns as I wanted to see the results from just using heat. I'm guessing if I used mordant the colours would be richer or deeper but I actually love these pale pastel shades for the projects I'm going to use them on. 

I have no idea how long the colours will take to fade as that's something I haven't studied about natural plant or vegetable dyes used without mordant.

The first batch came out with a very pale purple it reminds me of a mauve shade.. These ones are White Faced Woodland,  Chilean white, South American & Charollais. 

These also seemed to dye pretty evenly in colour.

These next pinks were from adding about a teaspoon of citric acid to the dye water and it was a lovely deep reddy pink.. But I am quite surprised that all these were dyed at the same time but came out different shades. 

I am thinking it has to do with the actual fibre breeds because there is no other logical reason why they didnt dye the same shade? 

These ones were Eider, Radnor, Falkland & Perendale. 

The last lot was the one that surprised me the most as I thought it would turn out blue but after simmering the water became a lovely deep frog green.. Maybe if I use mordant next time I will get the deeper shade.

I just added a bit of baking soda to the water to turn it the teal blue before it changed to green.

The shades are a bit different on each skein and more visible in real life than my picture shows.

These yarns below were Lleyn, Texel & Shropshire.

I definitely love these and next time Ill use some different vegetables and maybe some flowers.