Boiled Iris flowers to extract a dye bath. Transfered that to my crock pot. (I don't know how many I had. I think it was about 20 German Iris flowers). Mordanted approx. 4 oz of homespun wool with alum (2T) and cream of tartar (1.5 tsp.).
Put the wool into the dye bath and heated it up. This turned the liquid from purply to brown. Heated it for about 3 hours, and let it sit over night. And over night again. The color of the wool was a sickly yellow brown. Not very attractive.
I had a thought of adding more iris flowers (about another 20) and heating the flowers and wool together. I did that and let it sit for about 1.5 hours and then let it sit. (It would have been longer but there was this thing called work that I had to go to.) It sat over night. Removed from the dye bath and I let it drain for about a day. (Yes, truth be told, I removed it to drain, and then went to bed and had an early shift the next day so I forgot about it.)
The yarn had a very cool purple splotchy pattern going on, but that pretty much rinsed out. However, I think the fresh flowers added a nice greenish to the wool.
I did finally find something that said to mordant with tin crystals. Not quite up to dealing with that just yet.
If I have any flowers left, I might just try mordanting and then adding the wool to the bath with the flowers and heat it then. We'll see what tomorrow brings.
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