More Yellow

For some reason I love the colour yellow at the moment. I’m buying and scavenging and dying all the things yellow. Well, that is all the things that aren’t already teal, red, grey or blue.

When I was growing up my mum had a biscuit tin that was filled with onion skins. She had been saving them for years in order to use them as a dye. As far as I know the onion skin collection is still there.

Obviously these things run in the family as for the last 5 years I’ve been collecting brown onion skins in a tin. It takes a very, very long time to save 100g of onion skins.

Finally the time was right – not only was my tin of onion skins full, but tidying up my yarn stash revealed a skein of off-white Finnish wool that my parents-in-law gave me after our travels coincided in Helsinki back in 2013.

I followed a couple of blogs‘ advice about onion skin dying.

It was a three day process! I mordanted the wool with alum (boiled and then cooled) to make the fibre more receptive to the colour. I boiled, cooled and strained the onion skins. Then once again I boiled the wool in the dye, then cooled it off and rinsed the now yellow wool. There was still a lot of colour in the onion skin pot, so I dyed a pale pink linen tshirt that I’d bought with the intention of dying and threw in some grey linen scraps too. I then added another piece of white linen that I’d previously dyed bright yellow with Procion MX. After all those years of saving onion skins and the days of boiling and cooling there was no way I was going to pour the remaining dyed down the sink after 100g of wool.

In the picture below you can also see a poly-cotton bedsheet and another piece of scrap linen that I dyed with Procion MX earlier in the week.

I loved the anticipation and process of dying with onion skins and I’m interested in trying out other natural dyes such as black beans (blue) and turmeric (yellow). That said, it is very labour intensive – so I’m definitely not giving up on my Procion MX experiments any time soon.