Over spring break H came up with the idea to do some natural dyeing. A friend of his had dyed her easter eggs with flowers and he wanted to do the same thing. Well, instead of eggs, I said we should use wool so it would be something that we could spin and use. His first plan was to collect dandelions (got plenty of those!). When I told him how many he would have to collect, he quickly ran out of steam. Then we had the idea to try geraniums. My hubby's family runs a greenhouse and periodically they deadhead the geraniums. So when they did it that week, I asked them to hold on to them for us.
I knew we would get a lot of flowers, but wow! We got a whole garbage bag full. The next step was to boil some water put some vinegar in it and then start adding the flowers. The first day we added only the red as that was what we had the most of. We boiled and boiled all day long and put little wrapped bundles of wool in the water to dye. The color that we got from those was a pretty lavender mauve color. The second day we kept adding more blooms to what was left from the day before
. This time we just mixed all of the different pinks together. This time we got a salmony tan color. Neither of the colors that we got are what I would call wonderful, but it was fun to see what came of our experiment.
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