I have been collecting coreopsis blossoms from my garden all summer long. As soon as they look a little droopy I have been plucking them off and storing them in a bag in the freezer. I gathered enough to finally dye some yarn with them. I sewed a little drawstring bag out of cheesecloth and then soaked the blossoms in some water overnight.
I chose 2 types of yarn to dye:
1) Henry's Attic fingering weight superwash - from my LYS (4 oz);
2) Lion Brand Yarn - Fishermen's Wool worsted weight yarn (4 oz).
I used a mordant of alum and cream of tartar and then simmered the yarn for about an hour. After it had cooled to room temperature, I washed and rinsed the yarn. I simmered the coreposis flowers in a large pot for about 75 minutes, threw away the cheesecloth bag and then strained off all of the dye liquid to remove any residual plant matter. I then simmered the yarn in the dye bath for about an hour and left it overnight to cool. I had to rinse it out quite a bit until the water ran clear. I washed it in a bit of Ivory Snow and hung the yarn to dry.
Well, after looking at others' photos of coreopsis-dyed yarn I was expecting the color to be yellow. But mine came out an amazing golden orange.
Once I got over the shock I was actually quite pleased with the result. The superwash absorbed more of the dye, as I'd expected, and turned out darker than the Fisherman's Wool, which is more of a pumpkin color.
Next I plan to dye the rest of the Fishermen's Wool (about 12 oz) with black walnuts from my neighbor's tree. If the yarn turns out as I hope, the chocolate brown of the yarn should look nice with the pumpkin color to make a hat and some heavy-weight socks! I have been letting the dye liquid sit for a few days to get dark and murky and I hope to try it out in a few days.
3 comments:
I'm surprised you got that orange color from the yellow coreopsis. That's looks like a perennial variety?
I'm going to have to plant some of that next year and try it. I, too, would have thought that kind of coreopsis would give a yellow color. A fluke, maybe? Well. Consider yourself lucky.
this is gorgeous! and totally non-toxic unlike chemical dyes. do you know what amounts of mordant, water and flowers you used?
Sorry but I don't remember exactly what I did at this point. Here is my best recollection: Every day I went out to the garden and deadheaded old blossoms that were looking tired and popped them in a bag that I kept in the freezer. I'll bet that I ended up using about 2 bags (the gallon size) of flowers. As far as the mordant, I just used a basic mordant recipe for alum. If you pm me on ravelry (I'm susiequeue) I can try to find one for you in my files.
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