Onion skins on wool/cashmere/microfibre

A good friend of mine, Dr H (who can legitimately lay claim to the title 'doctor', unlike myself), has been following this blog and expressed her interest in joining me for a dyeing session. She came over to my flat on Saturday, bearing three balls of yarn, a bag of onion skins and a carrot cake. The yarn and onion skins were useful in the dyeing process. The carrot cake was not, although it had many other appreciated qualities.

To prevent this dyeing experiment from being too similar to my previous onion skin posts, we used copper mordant, which I've never used before, and some unusual starting yarn: the truly gorgeous Debbie Bliss cashmerino in white and bubblegum pink.

Fabric: 75g cashmerino (55% merino wool, 33% microfibre, 12% cashmere), white and bubblegum pink
Dyestuff: 35g (47%) onion skins, mixed yellow and red
Mordant: 15g (20%) copper (copper sulphate) with 4g (5%) cream of tartar

The dyeing process was exactly the same as my first post, with a bit more cake-eating between the various stages.





The result was a beautiful, warm fawn/beige colour. The yarn that started out pink ended up a slightly pinkier fawn, as you can see in the photo, but the difference between it and the white yarn was surprisingly subtle.

Here's the new fawn yarn compared to the cotton I dyed with onion skins in this post:



As you can see, this time the yarn ended up slightly redder, paler and much less saturated than in the previous lot. I suspect the main reason is the use of copper, rather than alum, as mordant. Also, I would expect the results to be paler since the yarn is a natural/synthetic mix rather than a pure natural.

The newly-beige cashmerino has gone home with Dr H who will be adding it to her own yarn stash.