onion skin dyeing

 A plastic bag full of yellow onion skins was calling my name, onion skins collected over a period of time. Now understand we're talking a fat grocery bags worth crammed with outer onion skins.

 One day, I would muse, I am going to take those skins and make an onion skin dye.

And the time was now.

I gathered my old dye pots and set to boiling the onion skins in water for about an hour. Prior to that I had mordanted my wool with aluminum potassium sulfate, now soaking in a pot of room temperature water. After the dye bath had cooled some what, I strained the onion skins, gently placing the mordanted wool in the dye pot and raised the temp to a simmer for another two hours.  There is a time that the dye is spent, but I wanted to make sure the wool would take in as much as the dye as possible because I was hoping for as orange of a color as I could get.

Then the next day I  thought I would try putting in another skein of mordanted wool to see if the dyebath was entirely exhausted or not, it came out a very pale orange (not shown in true color, the very pale orange looks cream in some of the photos).

                                                 

                  The colors of autumn on a November day.