Onion skins on cotton cardigan

I haven't posted in forever, which is down to the fact that I lost my camera cable and managed to break my install of Gimp. I still haven't fixed it so I've had to use iPhoto to resize these photos. For the record, iPhoto is a piece of iShit - which is weird since everything else Apple does appears to be ace.

So this was a brand new cardigan which I dyed in February. It was beautifully successful.

Fabric: 170g cotton, fashioned into a cardigan
Dyestuff: 51g (30%) onion skins, mixed yellow and red
Mordant: 42g (25%) alum with 10g (6%) washing soda
Colour modifier: 3.5g (2%) copper with 68ml (40%) white vinegar




Mordanting the cardigan with alum & washing soda...



Boiling up the onion skins...



Bringing the mordanted cardigan up to the boil in the dyebath...



Modifying the colour with copper and vinegar...



The finished cardigan.

Unfortunately, I managed to drop and break my thermometer during this process (bloody PMT!) so I had to guess all the temperatures - although cotton is very resilient so it doesn't matter if you end up boiling it. I shall have to find another thermometer from somewhere. Maybe an armour-plated one, to avoid any future instances of scattering thousands of tiny beads of mercury all over my kitchen floor.