Crafty Herbal Knitter

I recently posted about dyeing some yarn with pineapple sage flowers from my garden. I wasn’t all that happy with the results but it was an experiment so I wasn’t too disappointed. My next batch of yarn from the garden was going to be done with marigold flowers. I have been wanting to get to it for awhile now but it was taking foreverto gather enough flowers to dye with. Next year I plan on planting a lot more to prevent this from happening. I did another experiment with some of the marigold flowers. In my garden I have a couple of marigold plants that are the typical orange/gold marigold and a few that are a deep orange red. This picture sort of shows the difference in the two.

For the experiment, I thought I would mix the two types of flowers up instead of keeping them separate when I make the dye bath. The resulting dye was a blood red! I added the yarn that was previously mordanted with alum. Almost instantly it turned a bright yellow. I left it to simmer and was meaning to check on it every 5 minutes but I do have a 13 month old. I ended up having to attend to Princess A and unfortunately the yarn got put on the back burner, literally. The yarn ended up being in the dye about 40 minutes. Way longer than I had intended. That long soak in the simmering dye bath caused it to take on a more brownish-yellow. Still nice but maybe not what I would have gone for had I been able to keep a closer eye on it.

Once it was cool, I decided to try dip dyeing it in an iron modifier. (I will try to explain what exactly is an iron modifier for those who are interested in a future post). I added one end to the pot with the iron modifier and allowed it to simmer for about 5 minutes. This gave one end of the skein an olive green color.

All in all it was not a bad experiment. I only wish I wasn’t interrupted like I was because it would have been nice to have gotten the yarn out of the pot before it started turning more brown. I still like the results though. I did try to over-dye the pineapple sage yarn with the remaining marigold dye. Unfortunately, there was not enough dye left over to really do much but turn it just a little yellow. Now it is more a yellow fawn color! I have yet to have been able to get a decent picture of it otherwise I would post one.

This final picture is of the marigold yarn re-skeined. I love when you re-skein them and all the colors mix. That is always the fun part to me!

Filed under: Dyeing, Dyeing with Herbs, Knitting on November 13th, 2007