Naturally Dyed Wool Yarn – Dyeing with Marigolds

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Bring the colors of your garden into your wool yarn by dyeing with marigolds, the perfect beginner’s dyeing project.

Dyeing fibers in any form, whether it is roving, yarn, fabric, or fleece, can feel like you are conducting a science experiment.

You have to control volumes, weights, acidity, and temperatures to get the color you want. Even the container you dye in can make a difference to the final color. On top of that, you have to worry about how well the color will stay in the yarn once you’ve dyed it. And even with all these variables considered, you don’t know what you’re going to get until the very end.

With all this risk in dyeing, I’ve been mostly content to let experts dye my yarn and fiber, and enjoy what they’ve created. I dabbled a bit with yarn tinctures from Abundant Earth Fiber. Anything more complicated than that I’ve avoided.

A couple of years ago, my good friend gave me the book Wild Color: The Complete Guide to Making and Using Natural Dyes by Jenny Dean. I started to flip through the book and knew right away that this would be my gateway into dyeing.

Something about taking plants from my back yarn to create a rainbow of yarn made me so excited. It brought back memories of being a little kid, making “potions” in my backyard.

There are so many different dye plants you can use for their natural color. I started dyeing with marigolds, the perfect beginner dye plant. These gorgeous, easy to grow flowers, make lovely yellow dyes. Let me show you what I did so you can start dyeing with your own backyard!

Some Things You’ll Need

Before you get dying, there are a few things you need to have

1. A big, non-reactive pot (or two)

A dye pot is essential for natural dying. You won’t get very far without one. Because different dyes can react to different materials, you need to be careful what your dye pot is made of. Stainless steel is a good choice and easy to find.

If you are thinking to yourself, “Great! I already have a stainless steel pot, I can just use that,” wait!

Once you start dyeing with a specific pot, you don’t want to use it for food. Just because a dye is “natural” and made from plants you find in your yard, doesn’t mean it can’t make you sick. So don’t use your favorite stock pot, unless you’re ready to buy a new one.

Luckily, thrift stores are a great place to find used stainless steel pots that are cheap, and perfect for dying. I picked up two different pots that I used when dyeing with marigolds.

You can successfully dye with just one pot, but I found having two very helpful.

2. Utensils

While you are thrifting for your dye pots, keep an eye out for some utensils like tongs or spoons you can use for manipulating your dye and yarn, that you don’t mind getting stained. Remember not to cook with these!

3. Colander

One more kitchen item that is super helpful for natural dying is a strainer or colander. When you are making your dye, you’ll want to separate the plant material from the water before adding your yarn. Having a way to strain it makes this step super easy.

Just like the dye pot and the utensils, any colander or strainer you use for dyeing should not be used for food preparation.

4. Scale

To make sure you get the results you want, you need a way to measure the dyestuff, yarn, and mordant you are working with.

The easiest way to measure these things is to use a digital kitchen scale.

5. Mordant

No, we aren’t going to throw a ring into a fiery volcano. A mordant helps fix a dye so it doesn’t wash away.

Not all natural dyes need a mordant, but it helps your dyes stay in your yarn, and can give a brighter color, even for dyes that stay on their own. Marigolds dye better with a mordant.

While there are different substances that can be used as a mordant, I kept things simple by using potassium alum. This is readily available online, fairly cheap, and is used in food preservation, so it doesn’t make me nervous to have around the house.

6. Something to Make Dye With

For my very first time using natural dye, I wanted a dye material from my own backyard that I could use to make a beautifully dyed yarn.

Luckily for me, my neighbor planted marigolds all over the yard and didn’t mind me harvesting flowers for dyeing. I went around and took just the flowers off of plants. In the end, I had just over 100 grams of flowers.

As a general rule, you want about the same weight of dye stuff as what you will dye. Since I was dyeing about 120 grams of yarn, this worked out well.

7. Something to Dye

You can use natural dye to color all sorts of things. Wool, particularly yarn, is a popular choice, but any sort of animal or plant based material can be used. Different materials with react to the dye differently. You might get different shades or tones of color, and how well the dye is taken up by the material will vary as well. This is all part of the experimentation!

In general, fibers can be categorized as natural fibers and synthetic fibers. Synthetic fibers are more particular l about being dyed, and not usually recommended for natural dyeing. 

Natural fibers, are either protein fibers or cellulose fibers. Protein fibers come from animals and include wool and silk. Cellulose fibers come from plant materials and include cotton and linen. Protein fibers will dye more similarly to each other than they will to cellulose fibers. This experiment uses animal fibers, your results may vary with vegetable fibers.

I decided to be very brave with my first dying attempt and used some of my handspun yarn. I pulled out some stricken lonk yarn, which is mostly white but has small flecks of black in it. I knew this would dye beautifully. 

8. A Notebook

This isn’t 100% necessary, but if you want to keep experimenting with natural dyeing, it is a great idea to start a notebook where you can keep track of everything you did. What fiber type you used, how much dye material, how long you let things sit. All of this will be important information the next time you go to dye with marigolds, or anything else from your backyard!

And no matter how good your memory is, trust me when I say you are always better off writing it down.

Time to Get Dyeing!

Natural dyeing is a process that cannot be rushed. Time is your friend, and taking your time for each step will give the best results. It took me a couple of days to dye my yarn. I could have squeezed it into one day, but I didn’t need or want to.

Day 1: Making the Dye

The first thing I did was make my dye bath. I went out to the garden and picked all the marigold flowers I could find, weighed them and put them into my thrifted dye pot. Then, I covered the fresh flowers with a few liters of tap water, brought the water to a gentle simmer, and left it alone for about 30 minutes.

Once all the color had leeched from the flowers, I turned off the heat and let the dye cool overnight.

The next morning, I strained the dye from one dye pot to the other. This is when it became helpful to have two different not for food pots to work with.

Day 2: Preparing the Yarn

With my dye ready to go, next I needed to get my yarn ready to dye.

Wool yarn is very water-resistant, it’s one of the properties that can make wool so wonderful for keeping warm. But, it also can make it difficult to even absorb the mordant and the dye.

To make sure everything is absorbed evenly, you need to pre-soak your yarn in warm water. I let my skeins of yarn sit in water for a couple of hours to make sure the fibers were fully saturated.

While the yarn was soaking, I made up my mordanting solution. Wild Color recommended using about 10% of alum to the amount of yarn you will be dyeing. This meant I dissolved about 10 grams or 2 teaspoons of alum into hot water, then diluted it with enough water to cover my yarn in my empty dye pot. 

Then, I wrung out the excess water from my yarn and added it to the mordant bath and left it overnight.

Day 3: Dyeing with Marigolds

It’s finally time to get some color into the yarn!

I removed the yarn from the mordant bath and gently squeezed out the extra water. Then, I placed my yarn into my marigold dye bath and put it on a low heat. Once it just started to bubble, I let it gently simmered for about an hour. Once the yarn had absorbed all the dye, I turned off the heat and let it cool in the pot overnight. 

Day 4: Finishing the Yarn

Once the yarn was nice and cool, I removed it from the dye and rinses out the excess dye. It was very nice outside when I was dyeing this yarn, so I rinsed off the extra dye liquid outside, with cool water from the hose. This also helped prevent turning my kitchen yellow. 

It took quite a bit of rinsing to get all the extra dye to wash away, but once the water was running clear, I squeezed out as much excess water and I could and left my yarn out to dry. 

Marigold Dyed Yarn

I love how the final color turned out! It’s such a warm, happy shade of yellow, and I can’t wait to make something beautiful with it. I am making plans for a dye garden for next year to see what I can create.

Take a look in your yard, and you might be surprised what you have around you that you can use to dye yarn. I hope you give dyeing with marigolds a try! 

Dyeing with Marigolds

Naturally Dyed Wool Yarn - Dyeing With Marigolds

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Bring the colors of your garden into your wool yarn by dyeing with marigolds, the perfect beginner's dyeing project.

Materials

• Wool yarn to dye
• Marigold flowers (as much by weight as yarn to be dyed)
• Potassium alum powder (10 grams per 100 grams of yarn)

Tools

• Do not use dyeing tools for food preparation
• 2 nonreactive pots
• Strainer or Colander
• Large Spoon/Tongs
• Scale
• Notebook

Instructions

Create dye

1. Simmer marigold flowers in enough water to cover yarn for 30 minutes,
2. Let cool
3. Strain out flowers

Prepare Yarn

1. Soak yarn in plain water for at least 2 hours
2. While yarn is soaking, dissolve alum powder in a small amount of boiling water. To determine how much alum powder is 10% of your yarn, follow this equation: weight of yarn x 0.1 = weight of alum example: 100 grams of yarn x 0.1 = 10 grams of alum
3. Add enough plain water to alum solution to cover yarn
4. Remove excess water from yarn
5. Add yarn to alum solution and let soak overnight

Dye Yarn

1. Remove excess alum solution from yarn and add to marigold dye
2. Gently simmer yarn and dye until yarn is fully saturated (around an hour)
3. Let cool
4. Remove yarn from dye and rinse off extra dye
5. Remove excess water from yarn
6. Hang yarn to dry

Enjoy your marigold dyed yarn!

If you want to see more yarn adventures, click here!

Have you ever tried natural dyeing? Let me know what you like to dye with in the comments below!