dyeing again

i thought it was time to get proper and premordant some fabric, so i dug out the alum i had in stock (exp. date 2004!!!) and got stuck in - i soaked a few pieces of different types of silk and then moved on to making a few bundles

i supposed i should really have done some organised test batches with different sources of dye ..... but that's far to sensible for me - i just made up a couple of bundles with eucalyptus twigs and leaves, vine leaf stems, maple leaves, fresh pomegranate rind and some bottle brush flower parts from my dried flora stash

i only took one 'before' pic, this became a sandwich of 2 types of silk with pomegranate, euc twigs, vine leaf stems & bottle brush:

i'm rather pleased with the results - although the vine leaf stems had been used for hapazome and dried they gave a surprising amount of colour, silk clearly gives better results than cellulosic fibres - also the raw silk surprisingly gave finer detail than the finer silks in some cases

next was a sandwich of raw silk and habotai with maple & eucalyptus leaves + fresh pomegranate rind and a sprinkle of lavender - the maple leaves came out a bit pale and not at all the colour i expected (they were originally red), i might try doing them on their own and for longer, then overdye with other ingredients

the eucalyptus gave interesting variations which show up better close up

the most surprising one for me was the simplest - a twisted piece of raw silk wrapped around plastic pipe with a few fresh pomegranate chips - with only one dye source it's got lovely colour variations where it was in contact with the solution and different shades where the solution had penetrated a bit - i wonder if that's because of the temperature difference?

the last one was a dollop of avocado stone pulp after maceration for extracting the colour, i dummped it in the middle of a piece of dupion folded in four, gathered it up and tied it like a bouquet garni - it gave a pleasantly subtle effect 

i've put more shots into a  slideshow

i just had a thought ...... i should have done some snow dyeing last week, drat, too late!

..... and it's time to unwrap my garden wraps .... i'm waiting for some new camera batteries so i can take last shots of them in situ ......more soon