Dyeing

• Indigo
  The first indigo experimentation was a chemical vat, and has now been partially turned into a fermentation vat. There is also a bucket of urine and indigo sitting around in Karen's back yard in hopes of being ready by the weekend.
• Madder
  First experiments by both of us yielded various shades of orange. Most recent experiment we were rather excited to actually get red wool (admittedly a fairly tomatoey red, but still red). The linen turned out a rather disturbingly bright flamingo/bubblegum pink. Silk is a dark coral, unmordanted wool a nice peach.
• Turmeric
  We tried this simply because it was there. Don't know how widespread it was as a dye, since the colour is not very lightfast (at least from previous experiments). Unmordanted wool gave a bright yellow, mordanted a deep, bright gold. Tried overdyeing some indigo, but the alkaline still in the indigo messed up the turmeric colours, making it browner (not alkaline enough to make pink)
• Elderberries
  Karen has played with these before and managed both a brown and a purple, depending on the state of the berries at the time. This time the wool is a browny purple, silk came out a more reddish purple. We plan to freeze some berries to take to our midwinter camping event to do some more dyeing (only event we can have a fire at).
• Alkanet
  Soaked in bad whisky for a few days, then boiled up with alum mordanted wool and silk. Wool went very dark, almost navy blue. Silk was much paler, a slightly purple silver-grey. Interestingly, the skein of silk that went into the mordant 5 minutes later than the others was visibly a shade darker - will have to experiment with that some more (and try to get some redder shades from the alkanet too)

• Safflower