Thanking The Tree

Back in October I gathered up a bucket of green walnuts from this tree just outside our front field.  At the time I was thinking I'd just play around with some natural dyeing and offer the dye pot to anyone else who'd like to give it a try as well.

Somewhere along the line I decided to try to dye a sweater quantity of yarn.  I've never dyed a sweater quantity of anything except the Renny sweater, but that had been dyed before it was carded for spinning. 

Yarn can be tricky to get dyed evenly and I was concerned about messing up some of my special yarn, but I decided there was no better yarn to learn with than the yarn made from the sheep who have taught me so many other things along the way.

I picked out a pattern and calculated colors and yardage.  The pattern is another one from the same designer as the Muffin and Pepperpot sweater.  The post I've linked to is a Wovember post from 2019 and the prompt for that day was Traceability.  It's hard to be more traceable than raising the yarn and picking up the dye stuff from the front field.  I even used rainwater collected from the barn roof.  

I can't believe I'm not participating in Wovember this year, but this entire year has honestly been a mental struggle and I just couldn't muster it. Wovember this year might just be a pile of pretty wool yarn resting under the tree who provided the natural dye for it...and that's not too shabby.  Casting on for the sweater seems like a good prize.

I was hoping there might still be a few green walnuts to be found for the photo, but most were now black and rotting.  You can still use those walnuts I believe, but the greens are where you get your best colors.  Three is always a good photo pose number...and I found exactly three.  :-)

As I walked back to the Wool House, Baba met me in the driveway and wanted to see what I was carrying.  As it has no resemblance to a box of cookies, I have to think she was truly interested in what it was.  I told her she was mixed into that yarn.  It's the Lamb Camp Bottle Lamb yarn.

I can't get the colors right on this picture, but I liked the way the skeins look like a river of color. 

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Technical notes:

I put the green walnuts in a mesh bag and soaked them in a bucket of rain water for about a week.  I don't think you need to soak them that long, but that's how the schedule worked.

I poured the water and the bag of walnuts into a large stainless steel pan and simmered them for about an hour.  I then divided the dye evenly into three pans and divided the sweater body yarn into three even skeins.  I was able to get the three pans pretty close in color, but not perfect.  

Near the end I poured them all into the big pot and cooked them together off and on for a couple of days.  I wasn't getting the same color as the samples I'd done so I periodically pulled the yarn out and added the walnut bag back in and cooked them some more.

In the end I didn't get the main yarn quite as rich as I'd hoped, but I think that worked out fine as it makes a bigger contrast from the dark skeins and will be prettier in the pattern. 

The dark skeins were done by first using more walnuts to strengthen the dye.  I got them as dark as I could with the walnut and rainwater and then rinsed them with washing soda to further darken them. It doesn't darken it much, but every bit helps.  There is an extra skein of in between yarn where I thought I was not going to be able to pull off the extra dark, but adding more walnuts fixed the problem and now I just have an extra skein that I can use for something else.

The light tan color was created by only setting the skeins in the dye pot for about two minutes and if I remember correctly it was while it was still cold.  

You could dye a lot of yarn in the lighter colors.  The darker colors weren't hard, but it took a little extra work and a lot of walnuts.  

If you've made it this far and you live fairly close, I have two buckets (with lids ;-) of leftover dye.  One bucket is fresh dye from Auntie Reg's walnuts so you could easily get lots of color from it if you'd like to give it a try.  Free for the taking :-)