A few years ago I planted the very dark purple, almost black, Hollyhock, Alcea rosea ‘nigra’. By now I’ve lost track of which were the original plants. I don’t know if some flower stalks are from the same plant as previous years or if they are entirely new plants grown from the dropped seeds. I also don’t know if they hybridize. I decided to keep the flowers separate and see how they dyed my yarn.

I have plants with very dark flowers.

One is a bright pink.

Another is a red purple.

Here is the white one.

This is a comparison of them all side-by-side.

When dyeing I followed the instructions in Harvesting Color by Rebecca Burgess, using the proportion of 20 dried flowers to dye 2-1/2 ounces of yarn. I soaked the flowers overnight and then kept at the dye bath at 160-180 degrees for an hour before adding yarn.

I think I kept the second and third in order here. The very dark flower yields green. I was surprised to see the lemon yellow color from the white flowers. These are one-ounce skeins of Timm Ranch yarn.

These are two-ounce skeins in new dye baths. Look at the photo below to see the slightly different shades resulting form the different batches of dye.

This photo has the two different batches side-by-side and you can see some subtle differences. I will have some of these yarns for sale on Saturday at the Fibershed Market at Fibershed’s Pt. Reyes Station Learning Center.