Avocados!

So, I've been collecting avocado peels and pits from friends for ages. I'd love to say how long, but I honestly can't remember.

The Dear Husband has been hinting that he'd like some of the freezer back from avocados (as well as yarn), so I got around to taking a few bags out.

A lot of the peels had been in the freezer for a while. Some of the pits were rock hard from freezer burn. And I scraped a lot of remaining avocado from the skins. (Note to self - wash the peels before putting them in the freezer. That helps with the ones I've done, but not the ones I've gotten from other people.)

So, with the peels, I scraped what avocado I could off the peels, and chopped/tore them up into nickel to quarter sized pieces.  I ended up with about about 12.5 ounces of avocado peel, and used about 4 ounces of wool (cheviot, mostly, but might have some other breeds in there.)
Wool was mordanted with normal amount of alum and cot (2T alum/1.5 Cream of Tarter)

The dye was strained using an old cotton bedsheet, because of all the avocado bits that were loosened. The bedsheet was chosen over cheesecloth because of the tighter weave. The avocado bits were really small, and the worry was that it would manage to get through the cheese cloth.

After straining, I resoaked the peels adding 1.5 c of baking soda added to dye pot after a while. The extract did become deeper. I added a cup of baking soda to the wool and in process dyeing.

After about 45 minutes, I strained the second extract into the dye pot with the wool.