Plant Dyes - Tansy and Queen Anne’s Lace

I picked my tansy from the side of the road, it grows about 4 feet high, and the leaves are sort of like a fern. What makes is easy to identify is its flowers – bright yellow buttons forming clusters. The flowers have the scent of camphor and rosemary, it can make quite a stink when simmering on the stove – go outside! Supposedly the flowers can be used as a mosquito repellant.
The tansy had been drying in its paper bag for almost 2 months before I got around to making dye with it. I’m not sure if the color would have been brighter if they had been used fresh. My dry plant material was twice the weight of the wool used.

As with most of my dyeing, I simmer the plant material the night before for about 45 minutes and then let the pot with the plant material sit overnight. I strain the plant matter from the juice; add my wool I have pre-mordanted in alum and heat to a simmer for about 45 minutes. I remove the wool from the pot, rinse thoroughly and take three bundles of yarn and put one each in a dip of iron, tin and copper, leave it to come to a simmer and remove -- 10 to 20 minutes -- or until the color has shifted . I again rinse out these samples and hang them up to dry.

The photo shows the final product, from left to right:

Tansy with alum, tin, copper and iron. Then Queen Anne’s Lace with alum, tin, copper and iron. These two plants gave very similar colors, except the Tansy with the tin is a much brighter gold-orange than the lace. The photo doesn’t show it well but the iron modifier turned both of these into a very deep olive green.

I picked the Queen Anne’s Lace from the land next to a freeway on-ramp. I knew the road crew mower was coming so I went back several times collecting only about a third each times. I wanted to get as many of the blossoms as possible, but still leave plenty to seed for next year before they mowed them all down.

The legend of Queen Anne’s Lace is that the queen was tatting (making lace) and pricked her finger, there were several spatters of blood and that’s why the flowers have a pink center.

The plant is closely related to the carrot, so when crushing the leaves in your hand or simmered on the stove, it smells like carrots. The root is supposed to be edible, but the plant also looks a lot like hemlock – yes, the very deadly poison of old. Both plants can also grow in the same place, so extreme caution should be used, make sure you have positive identification if you’re planning on using it for food. The leaves of hemlock smell horrible when crushed in your hand – don’t lick your fingers after trying this test, wash thoroughly and carefully afterward.

The Queen Anne’s Lace was picked in early fall, dried and wasn’t used until 2 months later. The dry plant material was one and a half the weight of the wool used.

Indigo!

comes out of the dye pot green

We got into the indigo - a totally different way of dyeing. Forget what you learned the day before, this is vat dyeing. Put the stuff in a pot,, add stuff to take out something, add something else to take out the oxygen, and make sure the ph is between 9.5 and 10.5 -- picky little process! I'll definately have to go over my notes to get this all straight in my head, but it was fun!

turns blue reacting to the air

When you take your yarn out of the dye pot it's green and as it reacts with th air it becomes blue - totally magical!

Dipping our yarns dyed from the previous day did somewhat as suspected -- turned yellows into greens and reds into purples, but what a color range we created without much effort.

our beautiful range of colors

Tomato vines/leaves

Back to a few more plant dye tests...

Leaving the whole tomato plants to finish the job of ripening tomatoes, I thinned out some of the vines and leaves to dye with. I was surprised at the nice soft baby chick yellow produced with the tin mordant, also the soft green-slightly gray with the iron mordant, that is definitely a color I would like to have more of and with the size of the tomato plants I have, that will be able to happen.

I read later that I could have possibly produced a reddish dye out of the stems. I think they pulled their plant materials after the tomato season was over done producing red tomatoes. Did this may have something to do with what color of dye the stems will produce? I guess I'll have to get out the "lab" again a little later and test the information.

Pyracantha - Fire thorn

From my bus window I started noticing this shrub with bunches of bright orange berries. I didn't know what it was, but asked my plant expert at work. I had not read anything about the dyeing possibilities, but thought with those bright berries something had to happen. I went on a stealth gathering mission, collecting only the berries. Simmering them for and hour, letting it sit overnight and then straining and squeezing all the juice out. The color reminded me of a amber, dark beer color; not as strong a color as I thought. The alum samples came out a light orange color, maybe like cream of tomato soup with a little too much cream; the tin with alum made a nice golden tan color; the cooper with alum made an excellent light red-brown; and the iron again made nice neutral tan-grays.

Carrot tops

Using the tops from carrots for dye -- who knew? It's fun to see the plant parts used for dye, it generally isn't what you're growing the plant for, you don't use the "food" part, it's the leftover parts -- tops, stems and leaves that get simmered in the pot. The carrot tops produced an nice range of four distinct colors, yellow to dark green, a little to brassy. I liked the dark green (carrot tops with iron) the best, with some dark blues, browns and grays, it would be a nice addition to the pallet.

Oregon Grape

OK I'll admit it, I want reds, blues, and purples. I had huge expectations when I gathered and started cooking up my oregon grape berries. They stained my hands when I picked them, they were dark blue, the juice was really red...

The top photo is the Oregon Grape plant, middle photo = berry samples, bottom = leaves

In went the yarn samples, a very dark red stained the yarn, it was really dark, almost brown, but it was a red. Then I tried the tin, and again a really dark blue - midnight. Disappointed, I really wanted a lively purple, but not to be. The copper and the iron produced really rich browns. Like before, not what I was hoping for, but pretty, especially within the group, it's really a wonderful way to get a lovely range of color by using the one plant, but altering it with different chemicals, they always go together enhancing one another.

The grape leaves did not produce anything unusual, I got the the tans and greens. With copper and iron the greens were very nice, soft and dusty, they would go wonderfully with the oregon grape berry colors.

Red Onion

Again there was the collection of dry onion skins, boiled on the stove for about an hour and left to sit until the next morning.

The colors were in the same family as the yellow onion skins, but all a bit darker. Again, a fairly distinct color was garnered from the different minerals added. Tin brightened, whereas copper added the more red tones an iron the green.

So far the onion skins, both red and yellow, were the most successful plant dyes, based on the range of colors gathered from one plant -- if only I loved the fall colors as much as reds and purples.

Yellow Onion

I'm not sure when we started collecting the dry onion skins, but we saved the outside part every time we cooked with onions. It was a fair amount for sample dyeing, but I still found myself raiding the onion bin at the local food store for extra dry pieces that had been cast aside.

I separated the yellow onion skins from the red/purple ones wondering if it would make a difference and as it turned out it did, not dramatically different, but the yellow onions were much brighter than the red onions. These were definitely vibrant colors; beautiful colors if you like the fall golds, oranges and browns, a range one could weave many a tapestry or functional item. The tin mordant brought out the brightest colors; this was the first dye batch which really brought out the difference between the prealumed wools and non prealumed wools, every variation was a distinct color.

The colors shown from right to left are: no mordant, prealum, prealum + tin, tin only, prealum + copper, copper only, prealum + iron, iron only.

Geraniums

I had prepared a bunch of yarn for samples, made butterflies, loosely tied in several places to keep them from getting too tangled with the others. I took some of them and use the pre-mordant method, reading that alum enhanced many colors, I simmered the samples on the stove with about a 1/2 teaspoon of alum the night before. These can be dried and used at a later time, but I kept them in the water to use the next day. I also got the rest of the samples soaking in water with a spot of dish soap, so they would be ready to accept the dye evenly.

The night before I also simmered for almost and hour geranium flowers and geranium leaves in separate pots and let them sit over night, hoping to draw out as much color as possible. I had great hopes of getting red dye from the flowers, since the bath was so red and whenever it landed on paper, there was a red stain.

The next morning it was the geranium leaves that were tested first. I didn't expect much except maybe some green color and there wasn't much to get excited about except the sample with the alum and time did produce a very nice soft yellow.

Then it was on to the geranium flowers, would I get red? Well, no; at first I was really disappointed trying all the mordants and only getting light orangy tans, a very faded orange, a medium tan and a nice warm gray. But when you look at them all together the colors were nice together, soft and natural. I think that if I would have been using a plant fiber like cotton or raffia instead of an animal fiber like wool I may have seen the red I was hoping for.