Dyeing with Onion Skins

I have heard it said that if you dye with onion skins you will never throw them away again! I think this may be true. There is such a variety of colors you can obtain with onion skins. I would like to try a lot of different things, different mordants, different modifiers, combinations of colors and all sorts of different things. I made a dye bath yesterday using 120g of dried onion skins. I boiled them for over an hour and let the steep until cool.

I had mordanted a pound of my wool roving and a skein of super wash bare yarn. I used 8% alum and 4% cream of tarter. I simmered this for an hour and then let it stand over night. I rinsed them all before dyeing them.

I dyed the yarn first. I simmered the yarn in the pot for an hour and then let it steep until it was cool. The result was a yarn I keep calling carrot instead of onion skin! It is a beautiful color in pot and after it was rinsed!

There seemed to be still a lot of color in the pot. I decided to run some more batches using some of the roving. I got four batches (one pound) of wool dyed with that one pot. The picture below shows all four batches in succession, left to right.

I was surprised by the result. Instead of just getting lighter and lighter, the amount of orange varied with each batch as well. The third batch seemed to have more orange than either the second or fourth!

That is all the dyeing with onion skins I got done today. I did do a second boil of the onion skins and will be curious to see the results from that compared to these.

I also followed a recipes I found for making an iron and a copper mordant. The iron is made with a ratio of 2:1 clear vinegar to water with some old iron nails steeping in it. The copper mordant is a 1:1 ratio of of clear vinegar with some copper wire steeping in it. They both have to steep for several days to weeks before they will be ready to use. That will allow even more colors from the same onion skins!