Monday, August 1, 2011

Queen Anne's Lace

Okay, so I have a lot of Queen Anne's Lace growing in my yard. Last year, it embarrassed me; this year, it intrigued me.

I had read conflicting things about what part to use, so I went and cut about 9oz (maybe a little more) of flowers, with a tiny bit of stem. (Sepals attached as well.) To that I added tap water, and have been letting them sit for a while in the crock pot.  I have a three-ish oz hank of wool and a one-ish oz hank in the water, mordanting with 2T alum and 1.5 tsp C.o.T.

According to The Fold in Marengo, I should have finely chopped up the plant or put it in a blender. Instead I'm just going to leave it in the hot water for a while and see if that will extract enough color. Many of the sources said a 2:1 ratio of plant material to dry weight of goods. So, hopefully, I've done this correctly.

Why, one might ask, did I do a large skein and a smaller skein? I wanted to experiment with over dipping the dyed wool in amonia, so I thought a smaller skein would be nice to see the contrast. Both skeins are going through the mordanting and dye bath, so the colors should be relatively the same before the after-bath.

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Update:

I had the yarn in the hot dye bath for several hours, before turning it off and letting it sit overnight.  The color is a nice, bright, lemony butter yellow.  I rinsed the larger skeing, and the ammonia'd the smaller skein. Wasn't expecting anything too dramatic, but it did give it more of an orange tint, closer to tumeric in color.

Next year, I want to try an iron after bath. Rumor has it, that would give me more of a grey-green.

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