Trying more plant based dyes

After harvesting the homegrown carrots, I have once again made some dye using the carrot tops but this time I am not waiting to use it at a later date, I am using it straight away.  I am also going to try a couple of dried goods for dyeing that I bought from a supplier, marigolds and logwood.

I mordanted the entirety of the white parts of a Jacob fleece in Bichromate of Potash first.  Its not a safe chemical and certainly not eco-friendly, which is a shame as by using plant material for dyes you would think that the whole process would be more eco-friendly than other dyes, but sadly not.  For plant dyes to take effectively you need to mordant the fibre and it is the various mordants that are not eco-friendly.

The fleece came from a friend of an ex-work colleague, you can read about that here.  This one was fleece No.5.

The first thing I dyed with was the carrot top dye that I had just made.  The tops had been chopped and soaked for 3 days, boiled up and simmered for about an hour.  I strained the greenery from the dye, which went into our compost bin, and put the dye liquid back into the dye pot and added 160g of mordanted fleece into it.  I don't think this is as vibrant as last time I used carrot top dyes but I am using a different fibre as well as maybe different strength of plant material relative to the amount of water.  I don't know, its often guesswork with me.

The next thing to go in the dye pot was some dried logwood which had been soaked in a little container of water for 12 hours.  This then had to be simmered for about an hour to obtain the dye.  Logwood produces dark grey dye but interestingly the water turned red when it was simmering.  I had read that if you add about a tablespoon of powdered chalk to the prepared logwood dye before you add the fibre then this produces blue fibres, rather than dark grey.  I gave this a go and put 247g of mordanted fleece into the dye pot.

I'm happy with the results of this one, I have a wonderful mix of dark blue and blue-grey fibres, this will be interesting once its combed.

Logwood can also be used on non-mordanted fibres and it is supposed to take.  The dye bath was clearly not exhausted so I ran and fetched some mohair fleece that I had had sitting around for some time.  I didn't dye all of the mohair but I did grab and good amount, 184g actually, and dumped it into the dye pot.  It didn't seem to be taking any of the dye at all until I added a good glug of citric acid to the dye pot, where it suddenly turned a mushroom kind of colour.  Not the best but not really nasty, I can use this, but I was hoping for some kind of blue-grey like the Jacob wool produced.

The final batch of dye was made using dried marigold flowers, which I followed the instructions for and soaked them for about an hour before simmering them for an hour.  I put 64g of mordanted fleece into the dye pot and hoped that it turned out the colour I had read about and that I hoped for.  No such luck.  Its quite boring to be honest and certainly does not have any orange colouration to it that my natural dye book said it produces with this mordant, as different mordants can affect the final colour produced and this is why I chose to mordant with Bichromate of Potash.