Making natural dye from carrot tops and using it

Today I've boiled up the chopped up tops of the homegrown carrots.  The strained greens were added to the compost heap and then I prepared the fibre for dyeing.  The problem with natural dyes is that whilst the dye itself is eco-friendly the mordant that you need to use to make the dye fix to the fibres are all metal chemicals and far from eco-friendly.

With carrot greens you can get a range of colours depending on the mordant that you use so you can get yellow, bronze or green.  I decided to try and obtain bronze which means using Chrome as the mordant.  I had to leave the dye to one side whilst I mordanted my chosen fibre in Chrome at a rate of 4g Chrome to 4.5 Litres of water.  I have some washed but unprepared white fleece so I used 55g of Merino, 40g of Alpaca and then a chunk of Mulberry Silk that I had left that weighed 6g.

Once they were mordanted they all went into the dye pot at the same time, keeping them in their own little section of the pot, trying not to let the fibres mix at this point.  They simmered in the pot for about an hour then left to cool before I took them out and rinsed them in salt water, washed it, rinse again and then put them on my hanging drier to dry.

In the photo below, from left to right is the Merino, Mulberry Silk, Alpaca with the top row showing the unprepared but dyed fibre and the second row shows the combed Merino, which was reduced to 33g after combing, the Mulberry Silk which didn't need anything doing to it and finally the Alpaca, which was reduced to 28g after combing.  The last photo shows all the fibres together, looking wonderful.  I'm very happy with the results.

I have ordered a blending hackle, as this was the right thing for me, so I am just waiting for that to arrive and then I can get blending all these fibres together.