Category Archives: Natural dyeing

November 12, 2014 · 6:27 pm

The quest for Eucalyptus Polyanthemos continues

One weekend recently, I went to Norwood.  Well, really, I was deposited in this well heeled inner Eastern  suburb while my beloved went on a mission further from home, with a plan for collecting me on her way back.  The idea was that I would look for a birthday present for my Mum.  I had a few other goals in mind that involved the very nice bookshop there and a bit of random wandering.

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At some stage I decided a gelati would be perfect, as you do, given the chance.  So, gelati in hand, I wandered away from the main road and down a side street to see what I could see.  There on a bank sloping down to an unlovely carpark were some glorious sheoaks and some not-so-common eucalypts.  To me they seemed like plausible instances of E Polyanthemos, but the tallest I had ever seen.

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The evidence there had been many-anthers was all over the ground.  I think my eyes were caught by the fluttering of somewhat oval leaves in the breeze.

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Before long I was climbing the bank and dodging the cars.  Some of the trees had been cut and had re-sprouted with juvenile leaves that were almost round, and quite large.  My manual (Holliday and Watton’s Gardener’s Companion to Eucalypts) says ‘The juvenile leaves are blue and almost circular, the apex notched.’  Round, yes.  Blue, yes.  Notched?

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One thing led to another, as it so often does (well, in my case)… so I picked a small sample and tucked it in my bag.

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After a long walk and as much shopping as I could take, I sat myself down at a bus stop and waited for the return of my beloved.

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This morning I unwrapped the resulting bundle… very pleasing.

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And another from the same pot… which is a little greener than the picture suggests…

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And now for today’s completely gratuitous flower picture. This poppy is a completely different colour from any of its predecessors.  You have to love nature, and the frolicsomeness of bees rolling around in pollen…

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October 26, 2014 · 1:20 pm

Alyogyne Huegelii

Alyogne Huegelii is a spectacular flowering shrub that is native to Western Australia.  It is drought hardy but blooms profusely, and this very much explains its popularity in gardens here in Adelaide.  There are a couple of these shrubs flowering spectacularly in my neighbourhood at the moment.

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One of the things I really like about natural dyeing is the fact that you can enjoy flowers, gather them as they fall or pass their best, and have the joy of the flower as well as your dyepot.  So I have been stopping by to collect fallen flowers from the footpath and the gutter, and pulling withered blooms that will not re-open.

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I crammed the dried petals into my jar along with some vinegar, foil, water and a woolen sample card.  For those who are not familiar, this is India Flint’s Stuff, Steep and Store process.  I have no idea if these flowers will yield dye–they are from the same plant family as hibiscus (and hibiscus petal yield dye)–so they do seem promising–but they are free and readily available and there is nothing but time to be lost by trying them out.  I might learn something!

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After cooking, I had a deep purple dyebath in my jar.  So I gave it a label, added it to my collection, and now we wait.  It belatedly occurred to me to check my reference books.  The Handweavers and Spinners Guild of Victoria’s Dyemaking with Australian Flora (1974) reports that they achieved pink-fawn using cream of tartar as a mordant (I haven’t heard of cream of tartar being used without alum, so I have learned something already).  They also achieved green and pale lemon with chrome, which I am not prepared to use.  My sample card has alum-mordanted and rhubarb-leaf mordanted sample yarns, as well as an unmordanted sample–and the jar contains aluminium foil.  Joyce Lloyd and India Flint’s books are silent on the matter.  So–we’ll just have to see what happens.

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I later decided on an alkaline jar, since hibiscus dyes are ph sensitive, and created another.  It leaked green liquid when I heated it, but the jar as a whole doesn’t look green (yet).

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Oh.  And, we have moths.

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October 15, 2014 · 4:22 pm

Quilt border dyeing

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I came into a lot of fabric and various other items from a friend’s mother a while back, as some of you might remember.  Most of it I found happy homes for among friends and their connections, and through the Guild.  However, I did keep all the calico and other forms of plain, undyed natural fibre fabrics.  There was cotton sheeting, parts of calico sacks, pieces of cotton fabric from which some item or other had been cut, and some small pieces of linen that  might have been intended for embroidery.  There was one piece of raw silk, too, I  believe.  The cottons joined the other fabrics that have been queued up for the soybean bath.

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I have also been re-mordanting fabrics that didn’t turn out as I had hoped, and some that I mordanted with tannin to no especially good effect in the past. Here is one such piece of cloth before dyepot.

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I kept remembering India Flint’s wonderful statement at the workshop I went to.  Perhaps I am quoting freely, but it went something like : ‘Everything will be beautiful when it’s finished. And if it isn’t beautiful, it isn’t finished.’  So all manner of things hit the bucket, and then the dye pot.  Others are still waiting.

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I think these fabrics will make a good quilt border, and hopefully I now have enough to get all the way around my quilt.

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Even the over-dyed or previously tannin-mordanted fabrics came out more interesting than they went in.  I think they will make good binding for the quilt.  They should tone in nicely but offer some contrast.  Recent measurements indicate that I have more than enough so…. no excuses, it must be time to assemble this thing!

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October 12, 2014 · 4:47 pm

Ply time!

A while back I had used almost every bobbin I own, each with a different colour of thread on it.

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Over time there were even more bobbins of singles than this pictures shows…  finally there has been a season of plying, skeining and washing, and now I have this pile instead.

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Logwood purples, purple-greys and purple-browns, a cochineal pink (and a cochineal-logwood exhaust), three indigo blues, two madder exhaust-oranges, and a coreopsis exhaust yellow.  I didn’t take good enough notes of the fibres–some are on merino roving (the madder), some on polwarth, some on grey corriedale. Maybe there is a little of Malcolm the Corriedale in there too!

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And there has been even more bee swarm action in the neighbourhood.  These bees have taken up residence on a rainwater tank, with some support from a ladder! And… I am so over tending the silkworms 🙂

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September 8, 2014 · 4:41 pm

An invitation, a week 2 silkworm update and some random happenings

Let me begin with some dignity, because it won’t last. Soon we’ll be back to silkworms and other silly stuff.  Anne Harris of Annie’s Workroom would like to invite you to her exhibition.  It’s in Brisbane, Queensland–I am sorry to report this means I won’t be able to see it.

Invite Back & Front

Expressions of Love: Lovingly Interrupted brings together established contemporary artist Kim Schoenberger’s collection of treasured memories assembled from the humble teabag. And introduces emerging artist Anne Harris’s work of naturally dyed, painted and stitched images exploring the emotions of love. Official Opening 14th September 3.30pm. Closes 28th September: Gallery 159, 159 Payne Road, The Gap, Brisbane.  There is a special bus to make it easy for sunshine coast people to attend. Please call  Anne 0433 162 847 for more information or visit her on the web.

And now… for the silkworm update of the week.  OMG, as they say in the classics, the silkworms are still hatching!  I have been struggling to figure out a cross-national item to give a sense of scale (US coins don’t work for me).  Here is my trial object.  Let me know how I’m doing!

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Here is a close up of silk worms in several stages of growth–with more hatching every single day two weeks after they started!  They were all laid as eggs within a couple of days of one another, I hasten to add. What more can I say? There is still just one mulberry tree with leaves on it in the neighbourhood.

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On the weekend, there was lemon preserving (the salty kind)… inspired in part by an anonymous donation of a bag of Meyer lemons left on our porch.  Three cheers for the grower and the tree!

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I had the urge to cast on, a lot.

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I also had the urge to dye and since it was warm and sunny, took advantage by mordanting fabric for future leaf prints.  I had the realisation some time ago that I had somehow managed not to find a section on mordanting cellulose fabrics, with quite specific instructions, in Eco-Colour.  I had always wished there was a section like that in there.  Happily India Flint has indeed put it in her gorgeous book and if only I had paid more attention… Anyway, since I can’t change the past, I have been waiting for sunny weather to dip and dry and dip and dry on a principle somewhat different to the one I have been experimenting with–and now the sunshine is here I got to it!  Good dyeing times are coming…

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September 7, 2014 · 4:48 pm

Blog Hop Around the World

Leah from Seattle Spinner has generously nominated me as the next person in her blog hop around the world.  If you’ve stopped by because she mentioned my blog, a special welcome!  For regular readers of this blog who don’t know her… Leah says:

Spin, knit, weave…I LOVE these areas, for a multitude of reasons. … I am fascinated with things that go to the root of who we are–things or ideas that existed before the world of modern technology. Instead of being pastimes, these were things needed for our very survival.

She has an Etsy shop: all proceeds (after costs) go to to support a non profit organization in Peru called Awamaki which ‘is a nonprofit social enterprise that empowers rural Andean women with skills training, connects them to global market opportunities, and enables them to earn an income to transform their communities.’  Such a sensational idea…

And now for my answers to the blog hop questions!

1. What are you working on?

I always have more projects on the go than makes any kind of sense.  Some lie around for extended periods until I can find the right amount of time or mental space to move them forward.  Right now I am knitting a pair of socks… these travel with me on public transport and to meetings.  I am practicing my picking and Norwegian purling, since I think this would be a far more efficient way to knit than the throwing, ‘English’-style knitting I learned first.  I just need to build up some skill by doing it enough…

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I have a quilt in progress.  Must get back to it!  All the blocks use India Flint’s eco-print technique to showcase a eucalypt species and I’ve embroidered the name of each tree onto the block in eucalyptus-dyed silk.  And stopped, having dyed the fabric for the front and pieced the back… apparently there is something about cutting the sashing I can’t face… or some part of me that thinks I need a week to do it in!

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I am spinning a lot, in several different fibres.  I went to a weekend away with members of my Guild recently and carded a lot of naturally dyed wool.  It must be time to do some plying soon!  These colours include indigo, logwood and cochineal. Many came from exhaust dyebaths after a dyeing workshop where I used old dyestuffs donated to the Guild.

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2. How does my work differ from others?

I am not sure it always does!  Over time, I find myself working further and further back along the process of creating things: over some years I went from knitting socks to spinning yarn to dyeing fibre to processing raw fleece and identifying local weeds and trees for dyeing and growing dye plants.  This doesn’t interest everyone.  Yet, I can’t claim to be all about process. I enjoy creating a finished thing that will be of use.  I am less excited about things that are just for display.

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I also find that I like to recycle things… I am interested in using every last scrap of a piece of fabric or yarn, and I enjoy turning fabrics that would otherwise be discarded into something useful.  Sometimes I think this is a recent impulse, but then I look into my wardrobe where there are shirts made from flour sacks and old damask tablecloth… However–I also have a large collection of all manner of fabrics, yarn and threads and have become a collecting place for other women’s fabrics and notions. Happily, I am able to give a lot of things away to people who will use and enjoy them.  This weekend, I am mordanting these fabrics, mostly salvaged from a friend’s mother’s stash.  Most of the prints and plain coloured fabrics have gone to new homes but I kept the offcuts of calico and white sheeting for leaf printing…

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3. Why do I create what I do?

I love to identify something that is wanted or needed, and the raw materials that would bring that thing into existence, and match the two.  Sometimes I make to request or to fill a need I perceive in someone else.  or I just imagine the delight a handmade item might produce.  I look for opportunities to make something special and think about the recipient as I stitch it.  But I also do things as they interest or inspire me and the look for the right home for them to go to.  I make plenty of mistakes and have become adept at turning mistakes into useful items and finding ways to use or refashion things that are not as intended, or seem at first not-too-promising.

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I also create to satisfy my fidgety nature, I think.  To fend off the possibility of wasted time or boredom, and turn what might otherwise be wasted to use.

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4. How does my creative process work?

Gradually.  I have a substantial day job, which means that I don’t need to make a living from my craft, and also that I have limited time for crafting.  I do what I can, when I can, and I am motivated by having an exciting idea, wanting to meet a date for a gift, or seeking to meet a need for some specific item.  I don’t have a spiritual or romantic sense of creative process.  Rather, I see myself as part of a long tradition of thrift, skill and creativity–and this delights me.  So many people in the developed world are now bereft of the skills needed to meet simple, everyday material needs for themselves.  I would feel a great sense of loss at not being able to make or mend.  These activities are sources of pleasure and satisfaction in my life.

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I have chosen to pass the baton to Barbro from Barbro’s Threads–from Australia to Finland! She says she is:

a handspinner who likes to work with many kinds of fibers in all forms. I’m interested in the history and cultural history of sheep and textiles. … Right now I’m spinning and researching for my master spinner title in my guild Björken at Stundars. I’m concentrating on three sheep from Finland (Finnsheep, Kainuu Grey, and Åland sheep), and three from Sweden (Swedish Finull, Gotland sheep, and Värmland sheep).

I am in awe of Barbro’s skills as a spinner and love reading about her textile adventures–learning new skills and visiting museums full of textile traditions quite different to the ones I can see here in Australia.  I am so impressed by her work toward becoming a Master Spinner.  This is something members of my Guild speak about but which my Guild can’t currently support.  Barbro also has a very handsome dog… I hope you’ll visit her blog and enjoy it as much as I do!

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September 5, 2014 · 10:42 am

Scogger!

Do you read those articles that come out every once in a while announcing the words that have been added to the dictionary since the last edition (like this and this?) and perhaps lamenting those that have gone into disuse?  I do.  I have a long standing love affair with dictionaries that began when I was a primary school child.  I had the insight that I could never get in trouble for reading the dictionary under the desk during classes while I was still in primary school.  I must have been regularly bored, or gripped by the dictionary, because I read it a lot.  Strange events followed, like the time I used ‘annular’ in a sentence, in a primary school story.  At the time we lived in the middle of Western Australia, where this was evidently unexpected.  I had a teacher who was capable of raising just one eyebrow, a skill I wistfully hoped to master and practiced a lot, without much success.  ‘Annular’ caused those expressive eyebrows to rise much higher than usual!

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I digress, but I am sure you had noticed.  I believe it was in Richard Rutt’s history of hand knitting that I found the word ‘scogger’. One of the happy moments of my young adult life was coming into possession of a Shorter Oxford dictionary, and ‘scogger’ is in it, right beside ‘scofflaw’.  It is defined in the OED as ‘A footless stocking, or a knitted article of similar form, worn either as a gaiter or as a sleeve to protect the arm; also the foot of a stocking worn over the boot to prevent slipping on ice’ and attributed to a northern dialect.  The examples listed go back to 1615: ‘R. Brathwait Strappado 130:   Fute-sare I was, for Bille shoon had neane..Nor hose-legs (wele I wate) but skoggers aud, That hardly hap’t poore Billes legs fra caud.’

 

Anyone who is wondering–especially anyone who has a native language other than English–should understand the meaning of this statement is not self evident me either.  At a guess: ‘I was footsore, for I (Bill) had no shoes… Nor leg warmers, but only old scoggers, that hardly kept my (Bill’s) poor legs from the cold.’  ‘Wele I wate’ has me puzzled even after some digging around. ‘Wele’ could mean ‘we will’ or  ‘choose’ according to OED or ‘weal’ according to one online source.  ‘Wate’ could mean ‘wait’ or ‘what’.  So this phrase might mean ‘while I wait’ and require context… or might mean something completely different!  The wonders of the internet make the whole poem available!  This makes it clear Bill is describing his rise from poverty and wretched, inadequate, hand-me-down clothing to rather finer garb.

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This scogger is for a friend who has a plastic elbow joint.  She feels the cold in it rather badly, though unlike poor Bille in the example from the OED, she certainly does have shoes!  This scogger is destined to warm her elbow on chilly mornings when she is tending to the hens and donkeys and on cold evenings when she’s checking on them again.  That’s me modelling it (ah, the challenges of taking a photo of my own arm!), and I admit, she is a different shape–but she’s tried it on and declared it suitable. It’s made of dependable sock yarn and shirring elastic, knit into the ends to ensure snug fit, as requested.  It comes complete with a heel an elbow for maximum movement, and needless to say, since I knit it in meetings, on buses and in queues, quite a few folk have been introduced to the scogger: both the word and the article.

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August 23, 2014 · 12:07 pm

Dyes of antiquity: Carmine cochineal

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Cochineal is another of the dyes I received from the Guild and used at the workshop a while back.  In fact, there was a choice of cochineals.  In what I realise now was my ignorance, I chose ‘carmine cochineal’ because it was ground up and I was unsure how I could adequately grind the whole dried insects I also have.  As you can see, after an initial period of being dull ornage, the dye bath was an impressively shocking pink.  It turns out that ‘carmine cochineal’ is not a shade of cochineal but a preparation of cochineal boiled with ammonia or sodium carbonate.  I borrowed Frederick Gerber’s Cochineal and the Insect Dyes 1978 from, the Guild and found that the deeper red colour I had in mind when I saw the term ‘carmine’ could only be obtained from this preparation with the application of a tin mordant which I am not prepared to use.  the colours we achieved with alum were well within the range indicated by the included colour chart of wool samples (those were the days!)

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The colour range on this card (with madder beneath for comparison) is impressive even without tin. 

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We dyed organic wool. I dyed silk paj and twined string (the orange string was dyed with madder). 

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I brought the vat home with me and dyed a lot more fibre in an attempt to exhaust it.  Here is grey corriedale mordanted with alum and overdyed with carmine cochineal.

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And spun–three plied.  This is my first ever crocus flower, by the way!

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The magenta silk embroidery thread had maximum time in the bath, since I fished it out when removing the dyestuff (in its recycled stocking) prior to disposing of the bath!

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August 17, 2014 · 1:37 pm

Socks for active toes

Last weekend I finished these socks–eucalyptus-dyed patonyle with a subtle indigo blue stripe at the cuff (I mention its subtlety since it is invisible in the image above).  We went to visit the intended recipient yesterday and I could wait no longer for the right moment to take a picture in daylight.

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There was less than a metre of yarn left when I finished these.  I handed them over and they were whipped onto enthusiastic feet in no time at all.  This was he closest to a still image I was likely to get.

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Pretty soon they were out into the chook yard with someone else’s shoes over them…

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Happily these fast-growing feet are the same size as those of an adult in the family–so in case they are outgrown they will still be of use.

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Then, up into the mandarin tree in weatherproof pants because of impending rain..

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And pretty soon my pocket full of socks had become a pocket full of flowers and beautiful leaves and we were heading home after some guitar playing, hot chocolate (or carob or dandelion, depending), chat and plans for a future shared meal and off into the evening with enough mandarins for marmalade and more.  Friends are such wonder and delight!

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August 14, 2014 · 12:16 pm

Dyeing red with dandelion–more speculation

Some time ago, there was quite a conversation about dyeing with dandelion here. Just in case the name of a chicory that I grow–Chicory ‘red dandelion’ might be a clue to some crooked turn in the path on this subject where names had been mixed up–I tried dyeing with chicory root here to no very exciting outcome.  I did a bit more research on the subject after our last conversation, and here is what I can add…

Accounts of how reds may be obtained from dandelions:

Winifred E Shand gives the account that got me started on the dandelions in my garden, in: ‘Dyeing Wool in the Outer Hebrides’ in Dye Plants and Dyeing–A Handbook (Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, Brooklyn NY, 1964) 64.  She says that to obtain ‘Dandelion (Bearnan Bride) Magenta (Taraxacum officinale) Use whole plant, boil for two hours, remove plant and boil wool for half an hour.’  The author clearly collected these recipes from other people, though she does refer to ‘most of the recipes which I have collected and tried out…’.  Mordants are mentioned in many recipes but not this one, and it is clear there are some  recipes she hasn’t tried out.  Those involving urine, for example, where her feelings on the subject are made known in plain terms!

There is a writer on Ravelry who states that she has obtained red from dandelion but was not using taraxacum officinale.  Rather, she believes the original Scottish plant was a red-veined form called Leontodon palustre.  Now known as taraxacum palustre (marsh dandelion) it clearly has been identified in North America and many other parts of the world.  It was thought to be a subspecies of taraxacum officinale in the past, and is known by a variety of other names.  You can read her account of how it was done, using a fermentation method, by searching for Purple from Dandelions on Ravelry.  That, my friends, is the end of all I can tell you about how to obtain red from dandelion.  On the other hand, I can point to a couple of  sceptics:

  • Hetty Wickens, Natural Dyes for Spinners and Weavers (Batsford, , London, 1983) 10-11 ‘Dandelion roots have always been a great disappointment to me.  Scottish dyers are said to have obtained magenta from dandelion roots, but I have only obtained a dirty yellow.  (My dandelions grew in Sussex).’
  • Ida Grae Nature’s Colors: Dyes from Plants (MacMillan Publishing, New York, 1974) 20 ‘Much mention has been made of the dandelion root yielding magenta.  I have never found it so.  One of my students from the East Coast [USA] says that a lavender-gray is sometimes obtained from this root.’

A number of authors I have read describe dandelion as a source of greens and/or yellows only:

  • Jenny Dean, Wild Colour: How to Grow, Prepare and Use Natural Plant Dyes (revised) (Mitchell Beazley, London 2010) 137 (Though see this post on Jenny dean’s blog which speaks to their reputation for giving magenta).
  • Karen Leigh Casselman Craft of the Dyer: Colour from Plants and Lichens (2nd edition) (Dover Press, New York, 1993) 134
  • Joyce Lloyd Dyes from Plants of Australia and new Zealand: A Practical Guide for Craftworkers (Reed, Sydney, 1971) 37
  • Alma Lesch, Vegetable Dyeing: 151 Color Recipes for Dyeing Yarns and Fabrics with Natural Materials (Watson-Guptill, New York, 1970) 41-42
  • See, too, the Harris Tweed Authority (this page has wonderful pictures of Scots women dyeing).

A couple of others I consulted offered no comment whatever:

  • Betty E M Jacobs Growing Herbs and Plants for Dyeing (Select Books, Missouri, 1977)
  • Rita J Adrosko Natural Dyes and Home Dyeing (Dover Publications, new York, 1971)

So there you have it!  Dandelions have many fine qualities but magenta dye may or may not be one of them unless, perhaps you can access Leontodon palustre…

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