Cosmos flowers are gorgeous and the cosmos dye is one of the most reliable and easy-to-use natural dyes I have found.

I have grown cosmos in my dye garden for at least three years. I don’t plant them now. They are already growing by springtime, and at that point there are so many that I need to thin them aggressively.

I pick off the flowers every three days or so to keep them flowering. I use some myself and I dry the rest to package for sale.

I wanted to do as valid a test as I could for this year’s cosmos collection. The three pots have two skeins each–Brown Sheep Co. Nature Spun wool yarn and Timm Ranch wool yarn. Nature Spun is U.S. grown and spun and Timm Ranch is even more local, five miles away.

These are the yarns in no particular order after hanging them to dry.

I’m glad that I kept such good track of the yarns and the process because I was surprised by what I found. Each pair of yarns in this photo were in the same dye pot. The darker yarns are Nature Spun and the lighter yarns are Timm Ranch. They all had the exact same treatment. In fact I had tied each pair of skeins so they stayed together through the whole process including the final rinse.

Every time I picked flowers I weighed them fresh and dried. I used all those values to calculate the ratio of dry to fresh flowers and found that dried flowers are 18% of the weight of fresh flowers. If I want to use 100% WOG (weight of goods) I would use 10.2 grams dried flowers for a two ounce skein. To dye with 75% WOG, use 7.65 grams, and to dye with 50% WOG, use 5.1 grams dried flowers. I wound 210 yards from cones for each skein, based on the yards/pound of Nature Spun yarn. The actual weight of each Timm Ranch (TR) skein was 2.3 ounces for 210 yards. I used the actual weight to calculate the amount of flowers for each pot.

Here they are grouped by type of yarn. I can’t see a difference between the 100% WOG and 75% WOG dye pots. The third skein of each group (50% WOG) is somewhat lighter, but not by much. That dye pot had little color left in it at the end. It looked as though there was still dye in the 100% WOG pot and after I finished rinsing these six skeins I added a four ounce skein that was already mordanted.

That four ounce skein is the one at the top right in this photo.

For more fun with cosmos try shifting parts of the skein with a dip in base or acid. This was a previous batch that I dyed. These are all TR yarn and the skein on the left is right from the dye pot. The middle two were dipped in a dilute lemon juice solution and the two on the right were dipped in a solution with the addition of washing soda. Yay!!!

The previous batch of cosmos dye flowers are sold out. I will have the new ones at Lambtown and on the website sometime next week.