Onion and Shallot Skins
I wanted to see if I could get three different colours just by using shallot skins and two common mordants - alum and iron. So for starters, what is a shallot? They are related to onions, but smaller and generally pack in more flavour than their bigger cousins. I tend to preferentially collect their skins instead of onions because the dye seems to be a little more concentrated and dyes just that little bit deeper. When I first started collecting the skins, I figured I had to collect a whole ton of shallots - more than I could possibly use. But now I have it down to a lazy science.
Wool: three equal-sized skeins of wool from the Prairie Sea Fusion line. One mordanted with iron (6% WOF) and two mordanted with alum (16% WOF).
General: Collecting Shallot Skins
My collection method is fairly straightforward - I collect all the lose skins in the onion and/or shallot display into a produce bag and then add one or two whole shallots into bag. A bag of skins with one shallot here costs about $0.26. I more or less do this for every grocery trip. Once I dry the skins for a week on my kitchen counter and then transfer it into larger ziplock bags and go into storage. Once I have about 3 - 4 bags I’m ready to dye.
Step 1: Weigh the bags
Once I had four bags relatively full of dried skins, I moved ahead with dyeing. First I weighed each bag - they varied between 30-55 grams. I wanted to set up two separate pots - a pot with one skein mordanted with iron (to get a dark brown) and a larger pot for two skeins mordanted with alum (to try for a yellow and a rufus golden brown). When dyeing chunky wool like this, I like to keep wool mordanted with different metals separate during dyeing. This is because excess iron is tough to completely wash out of the wool prior to dyeing and that excess iron can darken portions of the alum-mordanted wool. By keeping them separate, it takes up more space on the stove but I don’t have to worry about the metals contaminating the colours. In this case, I chose one 55 gram bag for the smaller pot (as the skein is 110 grams, the dried shallot skin to fiber ratio was 2:1 (50% WOF for the iron-mordanted wool). The other pot got about 130 grams of dried skins to 220 grams of alum-mordanted wool (59% WOF).
Step 2: Chopping it Finely
Here is my helper trying to chop up the skins using a soup purée thingie. It lasted about 10 minutes before overheating and hasn’t worked since. Undeterred, we went back to basics and used scissors. It took awhile but music helped. We listened to Peace Like a River at request from my four-year old about 400 times. It did not give me peace like a river.
You can see both pots in the photo - the smaller one for the one skein mordanted with iron and the larger pot for the two skeins After the chopping, I simmered both pots for about two hours and left them over night to cool. Personally, I think a onion/shallot skin dye vat is ready once all the skins have sunk to the bottom and we’re good to go.
Step 3: Make Way, Make Way
In the morning once everything was cool, I lifted out the onion skins to make room for the yarn. I use a weird frying/strainer thing I found at a garage sale. And by garage sale, I mean in a box in a lane someone left out after a move.
Anyway, I wasn’t too worried about scooping out all the plant matter (see next step), the goal was to free up enough space for the wool to freely move in the pot.
Step 4: Get in the sack
I’ve been evolving this step for a while now. I soak my skeins and then add them into 5 gallon mesh painting bags and tie the tops. You can pick up these bags cheaply at most paint stores. They’re designed to filter paint but they do an excellent job of keeping the fiber and biological matter separate. I can’t recommend this step enough. I’ve done away with filtering and decanting dye vats through cheese clothes and strainers. They also come in 1 gallon sizes for dyeing on a more micro scale (handy sometimes for jar dyeing). You still need to make sure the yarn can freely move inside so you might need a few bags at a time depending on the scale of your project.
I came across the use of painting bags in a mushroom dye class by Alissa Allen. You can find out more about her and her excellent dye classes at: mycopigments.com.
Step 5: Simmer
Ok so I forgot to take a shot of the skeins in the pot but I proceeded to simmer then (70’C - 80’C) for about 4 hours, left the two pots to cool overnight. In the morning, I pulled out the dark brown from the smaller pot and both skeins from the big pot. As you can see from this shot, I ended up with two yellow skeins but wanted to see if I could get a darker shade.
Step 6: Kept the Dye Train Going
I felt like the shallot skins had more colour to give, so I put back in one of the yellow skeins, simmered for another four hours, left it another night and simmered again for about two hours (skein second from the left).
For my next weaving project, I now have three new colours:
Starting grey: undyed
Yellow: alum mordant, shallot skins 4 hour simmer
Rufus Golden Brown: alum mordant, shallow skins 2x4 hour + 1x2 hour simmer over three days
Dark Brown: iron mordant, 4 hour simmer
