Osage Orange as a Natural Dye

An Osage Orange tree (aka hedge apple) that fell down in a recent wind storm is providing the materials for two projects I have planned for some time. One of them is using the wood as a natural dye for my fiber projects.

Today I dyed some Wensleydale and some angora yarn. It looks fabulous. Andrew was milling the wood for the other project I mentioned and he saved about 12 cups of sawdust for me.

Here's how I dyed the fiber. (Directions based on those found on Joy of Handspinning). I filled a pan with about a gallon of hot tap water and 4 cups of osage orange sawdust and let it simmer for about 2.5 hours. I then filled a big pot with 2.5 gallons of water and added 2 ounces of alum and .5 ounces of cream of tarter as a mordant. These amounts were based on the weight of the yarn per the directions I followed. I put the wool in this pot and simmered it for 1.5 hours.

After it was done simmering I drained the mordant off the yarn. I then put the yarn back in the pot and strained the wood chips off the water in the pan and poured the now yellow dye on top of the yarn. Be really careful not to spill any of the dye as it stains everything it touches and even left a yellow tinge in my stainless steel pan. I let the yarn simmer for another hour in the color and once it was cool I rinsed it briefly to get the majority of the dye off and then again in water to which I added a cup of vinegar. After thoroughly rinsing so that the rinse water ran clear I rolled the yarn in a towel to get out the excess moisture and hung it outside to dry.

The color stayed bright and I am happy enough with the result to want to
go to all that trouble to try this process with another type of wood. You can see that the two different fibers came also came out as two different colors.
The angora that I started with was bright white and according to crayola it is true yellow. The Wensleydale was more of a cream color to start and its called dandelion.