As I looked out my kitchen window, I see the suckers from the hazelnut tree popping out everywhere. Hmm. I wonder what color it produces? A quick search online comes up with nothing. Wait, there’s a small reference to hazelnuts used to produce a red dye in Turkish weavings. There’s not a lot of detail, but it was intriguing.
I grabbed my garden snippers and a small dye pot. I chopped up a handful of leaves and set it to simmer for a couple of hours. I plopped a small skein of the merino that I’ve been spinning into the dye pot with the leaves and simmered some more. Since I was interested in seeing if I get color, I didn’t pre-mordant my skein with alum. I just plopped it in.
A couple of hours later, it was a grey green. Not very exciting. I left the whole thing to cool in the pot. Next morning, I rinsed and plucked all the leaf bits out of my skein <grin> and hung it up to dry.
It’s not red (it’s so not red), but the pale olive green grows on you, doesn’t it? The bobbin above it is the merino singles for color comparison.
There’s definitely potential here. I have to try again with the alum mordant to see how the color shifts.
Grace
I really, really like this color.