Surprise!

So... here's another chapter of "experiments with plant dyes and their surprising results". I'vementioned before that my girls have challenged me to dye pink yarn using plant dyes. So far, I have managed to dye a very light pink cotton cloth using a rose-lavender dye, and I still plan on using that recipe on cold mordanted cotton yarn soon enough... but for now... well...
I decided to try a different flower dye - I got my hands on a big bag of whole dried roselle (hibiscus sabdariffa) flowers (according to the label) - the stuff that is used to make hibiscus infusions. The dried flowers are a very dark red.

I was happy to find that one of my books on plant dyeing (Ebner/Hasenöhrl: Natürlich färben mit Pflanzen; also available in English: Natural Dyeing with Plants) has a recipe for dyeing wool or silk with roselle - recommends 200 % WoF dried flowers to produce a light pink colour on wool, or a more saturated dusty pink on silk.

The yarn that I chose to dye is a 100 g hank of a wool / silk / ramie (60 / 20 / 20) blend. I cold mordanted the yarn over the course of several days using an aluminium formate mordant. No cream of tartar was present in the mordant bath in the first place. I placed the mordanted yarn in a warm solution of cream of tartar for about an hour prior to dyeing - but wasn't sure whether this would have any effect.

Because I wanted to dye a 100g hank of yarn ,  I went with 200g of dried flowers. I soaked them for a good 8 hours, boiled them up in the evening, and let the dye cool down over night. In the morning I strained out the the plant matter and placed it in a fine mesh bag to be put back into the dye bath. Then I added the pre-mordanted yarn to the dye pot and slowly heated it up to just over 70°C. The yarn in the dyebath pretty much immediately seemed to take on a surprisingly dark red colour - oh well, I thought... guess most of the colour will disappear when I squeeze it out and rinse it.

I kept the dye at approx. that temperature for about half an hour, then let the yarn cool in the dye bath to just over 40 °C. I took it out and gave it a good squeeze. The yarn was still a dark red!

Rinsing did take out a lot of the red (probably because my last minute cream of tartar treatment did not really work), but I was left with a truly beautiful maroon colour (I think it's very close to actual rose wood)!

Now - my book says that a second dye from hibiscus doesn't really yield a decent result - but since the first dye came out so surprisingly dark, and the dye bath still looked quite saturated, I decided to just give it a try. I did still have a hank of 100% wool yarn in my cold mordanting bucket. I gave it a slightly modified cream of tartar treatment - heating it up to about 70 °C and letting it cool down again. So... did the second dye bath work? Well, it most certainly did! 

This was what I pulled out of the dye pot - bright pink! I unfortunately forgot to take a picture right after rinsing - again, some of the red washed out, but I must say the colour that stayed is much better - it's a beautiful dusty rose shade!

Here's a picture of the dried hanks:

Those colours look so beautiful together that I definitely have to repeat this experiment, this time to produce a 100 % wool hank in the darker shade, and a hank of the blend in the lighter shade. 

So, why exactly did I get that surprisingly dark shade? The truth is - I don't know! I guess I was lucky to find dried flowers that are produced in a way that retains the dye within the flowers particularly well. That's one of the things I have come to love about dyeing with plant material... it's full of surprises.