Fiber Monday - Treasure Trove

Over the weekend I was given a couple of decade's worth of back issues of Handwoven magazine. I am in heaven! So many patterns, so much information... I haven't even made a dent in really looking through them. This morning I was looking through one as I ate breakfast and came across a short article about dyeing wool with bindweed. 

I paused. 

Bindweed, check (so much bindweed)

Girls who could use some occupation, check

Mordanted fiber (what you need to do to fiber you want to dye with natural dyed), check 

A completely free day, it looked as though we would be doing some experimenting 

H. and R. were all in, both for rescuing the flowers from the bindweed and for the dyeing experiment. We spent two hours weeding this morning and ended up with possibly a lifetime supply of bindweed. (It's amazing how much better a garden looks when you actually spend some time weeding, isn't it?)

The afternoon was spent making the dye solution and then dyeing the fiber. Here is what we started with.

That's two small skeins of wool yarn and a small amount of unspun fleece (Cheviot for those who care.) Since we had a lot of fiber I decided to double the ratio of plant to fiber. I'm glad I did because otherwise I'm not sure there would have been much color. My next experiment will be to used dry bindweed as that can make a difference. 

We did get color!

This is where I confess I don't understand cameras at all. That looks really yellow up there, doesn't it? The color in person is not yellow, instead it's a rather pretty pale green. I tried again in different light and this is much more accurate.

This is a color I would want to dye again, so I'd say it was a successful experiment. And if anyone wants to try it themselves, I know where you can pick up some bindweed.