Well here are my latest dye jobs, and here is the noxious weed, japanese knotweed, which apparently has endless varieties, this being one called polygonum cuspidatum, and apparently is an incredibly invasive weed, and grows in one spot here on the island in noxious abundance.I harvested these gigantic leaves last fall, and dried them, and here is the wool from that, it is the one skein on the left, premordanted with alum and cot, and then dyed ..a wonderful tone, and the two on the right of that are done with the dermocybes, (semi sanguinea) same mordanting as above...I almost like the one on the left more, as it is stronger in color, but perhaps in need to do the mushroom dyeing with more shrooms to really compare...they have more pinkish tones, and did add extra ammonia to them to pink them up some...although my water is very alkaline, I added even more, and they went pinker.so that is the latest, although I did get a great tip, from renaissance dyer on ravelry, from France with a great blog, www.renaissancedyeing.com named Andie and she has a great site for natural dyeing and awakened me to cold mordanting with alum, which I will try with my BFL tops as they seem to get to compacted with the hot mordant then dyeing process, so I am going to cold mordant them and save at least one stage of heating and hopefully maintain its loftiness.
I like that lofty word. I did a little acid dyeing this week, just about blew my eyeballs away with its brightness. I forgot how brilliant they can be, but messy really messy, and have to do it outside and pay attention and its chemical and sometimes I just crave its instant color... I am such a "color ho".. lol
