Dyeing yarn with natural dyes

After my initial stint at dyeing yarn with avocado pits for the knitting competition earlier this year I was very motivated to continue exploring this new hobby and registered for a workshop at the "Jardin des plantes à couleur" in Namur. The cool thing is that the garden is actually a place to educate people (definitely not only children) about which plants can be used for dyeing and how this works so they grow all the plants themselves; the workshop was one of the activities they organise.

I found it especially intersting because it was advertised as a workshop of "dyeing wihtout mordants" which is, strictly speaking, not actually true. As the instructor explained it is rather working with natural mordants that occur either within the plant or is added but is not too chemical. The lines are obviously blurry here because what actually happens with the plants is still a chemical process, even if you use natural products. But the point was not to use any of the more agressive mordants such as alum which I used in my first home-dyeing attempt.

The workshop took the whole day and initially we were planning on dyeing 1 kg of yarn each in 10 different dye baths but we reduced the quantity to 500 g with 10 skeins à 50 g to speed up the process a little bit. It turned out still to be an intense 8-hour day with only a short lunch break but the result is magnificant and I'm super happy I did it to understand the processes a little bit better.

We worked with dye made from cochenille (little bugs - lice actually - that are dried and ground), indigo (a powder made from plant seeds), onion peel, rhubarb root, walnuts, and madder root. We ended up with a whole rainbow of colours, the shades depening on the yarn used and how long the yarn was being soaked. For the walnut, the cochenille, the indigo and the rhubarb we used the bath for a second dye and the colours came out quite differently, if even more beautifully.

The recipe we used was very basic: for however much of the dye material we used we added 20 % green tea (just the normal one from the chinese supermarket) and 10 % citric acid. While the latter ingredient was bought in powder form, the instructor explained that you can also just add lemons but for the amount needed it would be quite a lot so it is actually easier to use the concentrate.

The only exception was the indigo which was much more complicated. I have to admit that I probably won't try that again at home, even though the blue was beautiful. Still, I liked using the everyday materials such as onion peel and walnuts which also gave amazing colours and I already started collectinng all my onion peels from cooking. I got a lot of good ideas and I'm excited to start experimenting again in my own kitchen!