EARLY DYEING EXPERIMENTS

In my naivety I assumed you could dye most things using plants that produced a coloured solution. How wrong was I. I then assumed that provided you used a mordant then everything would be fine. So these experiments were trials from plants in the garden.

Penstemon, Buddleia and pink geranium no mordant 

Petunia deep pink, sumac (stag horn) leaves, Sedum leaves, sedum flowers no mordant.

 

red grapes, green beans, choisya after mordanting using copper sulphate.

Lavender, rosemary, choisya and yellow dahlias after using copper sulphate mordant.

This was soya milk with Black nosed valais soaking and left for a fortnight. It is meant to modify colours when dyeing but is not a mordant in itself.

I used copper sulphate because I had some in a jar from my father's chemist shop nearly 50 years ago. It coloured the fleece Black nosed Valais with a green bluey colour, it is said that it can sadden colours so I guess ok for greens blues or yellows. 

I joined a facebook group educating about dyeing

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/naturaldyeeducation and learnt how not to do it and most of the above at best would be fugitive colours even using mordants ie. they won't hold their colours.

I also treated myself to Jenny Dean's book 

and