Our daughter in law is a great gardener and she very kindly devotes space for dye plants and flowers for me! This post is about dyeing with the beautiful Black Knight Scabiosa flowers grown in her garden.
I had about a sandwich bag amount of dried scabiosa flowers and placed them in a net bag in a jar on our south facing deck along with a 70 gr skein of mordanted Shetland knitting yarn. I pour hot water over the flowers and then add my skein of yarn. Since we were going out of town, the jar was on it's own for about 2 weeks until I removed and rinsed the yarn. I know from past dyeing jars that the water can get up to about 130 F just sitting on the deck in the sun. I forgot to weigh the scabiosa which does not make for good dye records but sometimes I just get caught up in the moment. The yarn is a beautiful leaf green and I am very happy with it. It was interesting to me that the cotton twine ties were blue! I knew that there was still a lot of dye potential in the jar so I added a quarter yard piece of linen and a skein of cotton embroidery floss to the now empty jar and returned the jar to the deck for another two weeks. As you can see in the photo, the cellulose fibers turned out much bluer than the wool, though still in the green family. All fibers were mordanted. I cannot explain the reason for the difference. Maybe more yellow went into the wool because it attaches easier and earlier or maybe animal fibers and plant fibers take the color differently.
(Unfortunately my phone camera can never get the color accurate. The linen has more blue than gray but this was the best I could get. You can see that the colors are all different even if the color is not exactly accurate.)
For me a big part of the allure of dyeing with natural dyes is the adventure of not always knowing the outcome. There can be so many variables including water, ph, the soil the plants are grown in, season and temperature of the vat. And so my philosophy is to love what I get and have fun and learn.
The scabiosa jar now has its third chance at dyeing. This time more linen and a bit of the same yarn to see if the color will differ from the first dye. Probably by the third use the value will change but will the hue? This scabiosa is amazingly potent and full of mystery. I really like the word scabiosa. It reminds me of a Harry Potter spell. Perhaps that is the source of the mystery.
Here the scabiosa was used for an eco print on paper with rose leaves. Lots of pigment in those flowers.
P.S. For those of you interested in such things, the wool and embroidery floss were mordanted with aluminum triformate which can be done without heating. The linen was mordanted in two steps with alum and tannin.
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