Onions and tea? No, I’m not making some weird Masterchef inspired meal, I’m using food scraps to do some more dyeing.
If you want the full low-down on my previous dyeing adventures, see my post here…
Today was the same process, but this time with brown onion skin.
Here are the results:
Now I tend to save everything these days, and I love tea (and coffee, a little bit too much!), so I started keeping the used tea bags and popped them in the freezer until I had enough. I have no idea how many enough is exactly, but I had a container full so I decided it was time to use them.
Once they defrosted I poured some water over them then put the pot on the stove and let it boil for 10 mins or so.
Up till now, I’ve dyed solid colours – I’ve put all the wool in the dye at the same time to get a consistent colour.
This time I wanted to do a variegated pattern, so I could see how it crochets or knits up into something.
I skeined up 3 balls of wool. If you’re interested in how to skein up some wool, see my video here…
I dipped the end of the skeins in the pot and left it out in the sun for a few days. Instead of putting the mix on the stove I decided to let the sun do all the work.
When they looked dark enough, I took the ends out of the dye, let them drain then put the opposite end in the dyepot, and left them in there for another day or two. Then I repeated the process, with the middle bits. Once the wool looked dark enough I drained it and washed it.
Hung them out to dry:
And skeined them up all ready to be sold:
I’ll list them as soon as I can.
Jacqui 🙂