Monday 23 January 2017

Ice Flower Dyeing.

 I've had several bags of frozen flowers of various colours in the freezer for some months and they are taking up too much space! I decided to start with the bluebells and was quite surprised to see the lovely blue shade that they made in lukewarm water. I put them into a mesh bag to try and keep the actual flowers out of the water, but as you can see a lot of the bits were small enough to pass through the mesh.
 Oh no, I added some soda ash as a mordant and this is what happened, no more lovely blue, but a watery yellowish green instead.
 Some more of the blue came out of the flower pulp and now the water is a bluish green, but still very weak and probably not enough to dye the cotton in the bucket.
                           Oh well, let's add some frozen coreopsis flowers and see what happens.
           Now the water is an orangey colour with bits of bluebell floating in it, not very inspiring.
But wait..........the water is now a deep reddish colour with the same coreopsis flowers still immersed.
I'll leave the cotton soaking for a couple of days without stirring and see what I get.

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