No matter how many times I have dyed with plant material I feel as though it is always an experiment. There are a lot of variables. After I decided to sell dye material I wanted to be able to almost guarantee an outcome. So I experimented.

Isn’t Cosmos a cheery plant?

Earlier in the year I saw a lot of swallowtail butterflies on the flowers. Now they are full of bees.

These plants have grown as tall as me. I pick the flowers every three days and there are always more. It’s amazing.

Here is one day’s crop drying in the sun.

Every time I picked flowers I weighed the fresh flowers and the dried flowers. I calculated that the dried flowers weighed 19% the weight of the fresh flowers. I found my gram scale so I could be more accurate than trying to work in fractions of ounces.

I did some calculations based on a 1:1 weight ratio of fresh flowers to fiber. I could use 4 ounces (112 gms) of fresh flowers or 21 gms of dried flowers to dye 4 ounces of yarn. I wanted to find out if there was a difference in the yarn color if I used fresh or dried flowers. The first step is to heat the flowers. I heat to 160 degrees, trying to not go over 175 degrees.

After 30 to 60 minutes I add yarn that has been mordanted with alum. I keep the dye pot at about the same temperature for another hour. I find the easiest way to do that is to put a lid on the pot and turn it off. I check the temperature in about 20 minutes and if it is going under 160 degrees I turn the stove on for 5 minutes, bring the temperature up, and then turn it off again. Using this method I don’t have to worry about it getting too hot and boiling. I let the yarn cool in the pot overnight before removing it. Then I can the next batch in the pot. I used these two dye pots three times before discarding the liquid in the garden.

This shows the results of those dye pots. In each pair, the yarn dyed with fresh flowers is on the left and yarn dyed with dried flowers is on the right. There is not a significant difference.

Here is an earlier experiment using the same dye three times. In the first pot one skein was gray yarn and the other white.

Lots of Cosmos dyed yarn.

The result of all this is not only yarn that I can use in weaving but dye products for sale. These are on my website.