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
