Lilacs

lilacs

Last year I tried to dye with lilac blooms from the garden. I won’t bother you with a view of the yarn, it turned beige…

I’d had some thoughts on the matter, 1. I should have really stripped off the little blossoms and not thrown in the whole bundles, and …

2. I should have heated the water more carefully. Most dye plants you can boil the bejeezuz out of, some need a gentle simmer, a few should definitely stay below 60 C to keep their brilliance. I suspect boiling was not a good idea in this case.

Usually pink, blue and purple flowers don’t contain dye that is useful on yarn, but I have heard stories of getting green from Lilacs. Problem is, life happened and this spring I FORGOT!

Anyway, I’d love to hear from anyone who’s experimented with this, what methods you used and what the results were like. Hit the comment section and pour your hearts out! 🙂 (please?)

Here’s one blog post that I found about it on the interwebs: Lilac and false indigo

I’ll really, really try to put it in my May calendar for 2013. (I blame the weather actually, we’ve had November storms all spring it seems, cold and icky and fire in the woodstove in JUNE for crying out loud!)

1 thought on “Lilacs

  1. Ha, Pia! I “found” your post on lilacs from a pingback from that link on my old blog. Sad to say that the lilac flowers faded away completely, within days. The work i used it on has no colour at all in that section now! It has no dye qualities at all, not even a stain.

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