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Saturday, April 3, 2010

Some more dyeing with yellow cosmos

Yesterday, I promised you a follow-up post on how I dyed my skeins with yellow cosmos. I wanted to make multicoloured yarn and crochet a jumper for me out of it. Well, I have finished the dyeing, the crochet is still to be done.

I have first mordanted the yarn with alum. In the meantime I boiled the yellow cosmos flowers (freshly picked from our garden) in water and poored the liquid through a sieve. This liquid,the dye bath, became dark yellow to brown and the wool was heated up in there to just under boiling point. I kept it at that temperature for an hour or so. The picture below shows the results.


I used iron water as a modifier, by painting it on certain areas of the wool, you can see it below.

I gave it some time to react, although it went very fast and here, you can see already how the colour has changed to olive green at certain areas.


Below you can see the final stage:
I painted on a solution of baking soda, dissolved in water, only at some places. The yellow turned orange and the green turned brown.
I now have skeins with several different colours: yellow, orange, olive green, which turned out even a bit grey at some areas, brown and a few shades in between.


Here is also a link to a previous post about dyeing with yellow cosmos:

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