Onion dye!

 I'm going to try and restart this blogging thing.  My first finished crafty thing of the year is dyeing with yellow onion skins!   I've seen some pretty amazing oranges when other people have tried it and figured I'd give it a go myself.  

My local grocery store isn't the best at cleaning the produce stands, which is lucky for me.  I'd go there, buy an onion and fill the plastic bag they had with the one onion and as much of the loose onion skins lying on the table as possible.  After a few weeks of just going in and buying an onion when I needed it for dinner plus a bag of loose onion skins, I had enough to dye with.   

Above are the experimental yarns for dyeing.  The top is natural undyed linen, the second is bleached linen, the middle is a silk and wool blend that I ended up not dyeing, and the last two are wools.  I have no idea where the silk and wool blend ended up.  I went from the dining room to the kitchen and it disappeared.  Likely, I took it with me when I went downstairs to let the pup out and put it down somewhere there.   I'll find it eventually but, because I lost it, it did not get dyed.

I filled my dye pot about half way with water and then threw four bags of onion skins in.   This was the look.  I then turned the stove on and heated the water until it was just steamy, followed by leaving it on low for about an hour.

This was the result after an hour.  I turned the stove off and then put the lid on the pot to leave it for a bit longer. During this time, I put the yarns into a bowl with alum and water to get them ready to dye.   I had washed the yarns earlier to get rid of any oils.  One yarn smelled heavily of sheep after that.  

Two hours after adding the onion skins, I took the skins out of the dye pot.  I just used my basket colander scoop the skins out and throw them away.  I missed a couple of skins but it got most of them out without the need for two different pots.  The dye looked to be a very lovely red when I finished but, really, as you will see, it becomes very, very orange!

The dye pot with the yarn looks like some sort of weird spaghetti.  I let the yarns soak in the pot for about an hour and then heated it back up gently for five minutes (just until there was steam) before leaving them for another half hour.

The final colors!   I will add a picture when they are completely dry (this was just the plastic box to carrier them to a place where they could dry!) but I wanted to show the good oranges I did end up with.   The linen dyed exceptionally well!  It's the wool that is the paler of the yarns.   I don't think I got all the lanolin out of it which might be part of the problem.  Still, not a bad color. 

I did rinse the yarns in cold water before I took the photo.  

The color is a bit more yellow now that it has dried.  In person, it is a very lovely goldenrod color for each of the yarns.  The brightest is the bleached linen - second from the bottom.  The very bottom of the photo is the natural linen.  The top is the wool I'm not sure I got all the lanolin out of which might have affected how well the dye took to it.  

Of these, I'm going to overdye the top and bottom yarns in the photo with madder or another red at some point.