Cabbage dye and Avocado dye

 

The results of my red cabbage dye experiment last month!

The yarn came out pretty variegated but that was my own fault.  I still like the colors and it's sort of a "sea glass" blue in person.  I might try the cabbage again with a couple of other tricks, such as using baking soda to change up the color.  My Mom *loves* the pale blue of the linen. She wants to paint her room that color!

Sadly, the avocado dye experiment last month didn't work out quite as well.  This was before I even rinsed the yarn fully.  Once it was fully rinsed, both the wool yarn and the linen fabric became....white again.  There really wasn't a drop of color that adhered to it.  

So, this time I decided to try a different method.  Rather than leaving three avocado pits in a jar of vinegar and water to make a dye, I just put 14 avocado pits in a big ole soup pot with a lot of water and simmered it.  

At first, it seemed like it was going the same way as the avocado vinegar experiment until I tested the PH of the water.  For some reason, it was only 5!  I added a lot of baking soda and got the PH at least up to 6.5.   

After simmering the pits for about 3 hours, I added the wool yarn (the same one I used in the previous because, seriously, zero color), and left that to simmer for an hour before I took it off the heat.  I then left the yarn in the dye pot overnight.  Below is what color it is now!

In person, it's a fabulous light mauve that I'm very happy with.  Also, the dye vat smells 100% better than the cabbage vat did.  :-)  I'll post pictures of it when it dries to see fully what color it ends up.  

More Experimenting with dyes

 

Not the best picture but it does show that the linen I dyed in the very blue cabbage water is...blue.  I will do a full write up with video (hopefully!) later but I wanted to share this much.  I'm holding a roll of paper towels above it just for the color focus.  You can easily tell it is not white that way.   

I used leaves of a purple cabbage and boiled it for an hour and a half.  When the leaves were pretty much green from all the purple being leeched out of them, the dye bath was ready.  The linen here has a rust mordant and still came out a rather lovely color.  

I did try to dye with the avocado and ammonia solution but it really didn't work.  I'm going to try boiling the avocado pits next to see if that works at all.  However, that won't be until later in the month.  

Experimenting with dye!

 I've been collecting avacado pits with the help my family, friends, and co-workers.  So far, I have enough for a couple of experiments.  The first of which I started yesterday!

The first experiment is just cut up halves or chunks of avocado pits (did you know they have seams?) in a solution that is 1 part ammonia and 4 parts water.  This picture above is a close up of the first halved avocado pit in the solution.  The jar I'm using I got for maybe $3 at the local thrift store.  It has a nice cork top that keeps out the smell of the ammonia.  

The plan is to keep the jar in the sun (see nice living peace lily next to it!) for the next three days.  I'm hoping it will get a neat reddish color on the wool I have but we'll see.  

I took this photo about a half hour later and you can already see an orange tint to the water.  

This was last night before I went to bed.  The water was very orange!

The next morning it looked like a reddish iced tea!  

I just took this picture and it is very dark.  I'm hoping to use it tomorrow!

For the other 20+ avocado pits I have, I plan on just boiling them.  The entire experiment will involve putting some wool in alum as an mordant, some in iron (thanks, SOS pad!).  I'll then put one alum, at least, in the boiled pits and one in the ammonia solution.  For the iron, it will also be one in the boiled and one in the ammonia. I'm really curious as to what range of color I'll get from these.

I also almost have enough onion skins for some fun dyes and I will boil a red cabbage to get a neat blue or even pink dye.