Veggie Dyed Flies

[JeffHamm]

Hi,

I've been playing with dying wool using plant dyes. It's easy to do. First, get some wool, I found this in a field where someone had shorn a sheep and left much of the fleece. Anyway, white wool yarn would be fine too, and you can dye feathers this way as well.

You can prepare the wool by washing in hot soapy water (remove dirt, natural oils, etc). Then, put vinegar (I used a malt vinegar) and creme de tartar in some boiling water until the creme de tartar is dissolved and add the wool. Let this boil gently for an hour. This just prepares the wool to accept the dye.

For dyes, cover your plant material in boiling water, slowly bring to the boil, and gently boil for an hour or two. For dyes I've used brown onion skins from 8 fist sized onions (brownish orange yellow), dandelions a small pot full of plants, roots, leaves, stems, and yellow flowers (a light fawn brown), beets (red), and spinach (which I didn't use enough of becuase I just used the leftover water from when we cooked supper, but this looks like it might produce a yellow/olive type colour.

Here are two flies I've tied where the body dubbing is from my veggie dyes.



The top one is a
Dandelion Bloa
hook: 14
thread: black
tail: two strands brown cock hackle
body: wool stained in dandelion dye
wings: slips from blue-grey pigeon secondary feather
throat: brown hackle fibres

and the bottom is a
Veggie Tups:
hook: 14
Thread: yellow
Tail : blue grey fibres from pigeon feather
Body: two wraps thread, then dubbed with Veggie Tup's dubbing
hackle: brown hackle

The 'veggie tup's dubbing' was a mixture of roughly equal parts of dandelion, light onion, dark onion, and beets (light and dark onion is just because I took some wool out earlier than others and this results in a lighter shade).

I'm quite pleased with the colours these dyes produce. Just have to get more wool to try some other plants and things (tumeric produces a good dye too, but I've not tried it).

- Jeff

[gpatton]

Looks like the dyes turned out pretty well. I read your previous post earlier and was glad to see someone went beyond simply thinking about dying things as I was doing, and actually doing it. Nice job. Have you by chance figured out a way to bleach feathers? I tried bleaching my grizzly hackle and brown hackle with regular bleach, but didn't get anywhere. I may not have tried long enough.

[JeffHamm]

Hi gpatton,

Thanks. I tried dying some white quills a few years ago, but that didn't go so well. But, I think I did a few things wrong (nothing used to fix the colours, so they ran later, and I forgot to wash them to remove oils, etc). This time, with the wool, things went much better. I'm sure these would do well on feathers.

As for bleaching, sorry, I've not gone that route. Perhaps peroxide would work though? I would think it would weaken the fibres quite a bit and you might end up with very brittle stems, etc. But that's only a guess and could be quite wrong.

- Jeff

[JeffHamm]

Hi,

I've started looking around, and there are lots of web sites concerning dying with plants and berries. Here's a fairly good site with lots of different plants listed and their colours.

http://www.pioneerthinking.com/naturaldyes.html

The dandelion dye I used was the whole plant (roots, leaves, stems, and yellow flowers) but if you just use the flowers you get yellow. Some sites have said the roots give brown, others purple.

Fun stuff.

- Jeff

[gpatton]

Thanks for the thoughts on the bleaching. I think you are right about it weakening feathers. I did notice it happened with the bleach eventhough the feathers never lightened, but I may give the peroxide a try just to see.

[JeffHamm]

Hi,

I tried grass (you know, from the lawn) as my source material for dye. I boiled about half a small pot full of grass (ripped up, roots removed, just the green leafy bits; best to grab from the fringe areas where the mower doesn't cut it as you get longer blades of the stuff). Anyway, I gently boiled this in water with some concentrated lemon juice for about 1.5 hours (adding water if it got a bit low). After that, removed the grass leaves by pouring through paper towel over a collendar. Added vinegar, and the wet and washed wool, and gently boiled that for another hour or so.

Ended up with what I can only describe as very blonde looking wool. It's a great colour. Actually, I'm really pleased with the colours these plant dyes produce. It's all very easy to do as well. Apparently, the final colour can depend upon all sorts of things, like if you use a copper pot or stainless, etc. Anyway, if you're thinking about dying stuff, maybe it's time to mow the lawn?

- Jeff

[Eric-WD]

Jeff when you get done experimenting, I hope your going to write an article so this information doesn't go away.

Eric

[JohnScott]

Jeff when you get done experimenting, I hope your going to write an article so this information doesn't go away.

Eric

Excellent suggestion, Eric !!

John

P.S. Jeff - if you stop by to mow my lawn, I'll take you out fishing on some great water as payment !! AND, you can keep the clippings.

[Ron Eagle Elk]

Article! Article! Article! This stuff is too valuable to have it slip into obscurity, Jeff. Please do a complete wrote up when you have a chance.

REE

[wsbailey]

Here is a picture of some of my plant/bug dyed mohair. Bill