I enjoy experimenting with dyeing felted wool for rug hooking, backing punch needle projects, and applique projects. When we harvested our carrots from the garden earlier this summer, I remembered reading in one of my natural dye books that carrot tops make a good dye. Here’s a look at how I used the carrot tops to make a dye bath and how the felted wool looked after dyeing.
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Preparing the Wool:
Before dyeing the wool, the wool needs to have a mordant added. The mordant prepares the fiber to accept the natural dye.
First, I submerged the wool in water until it was completely saturated.
Then, in my stainless steel dye pot, I dissolved alum powder in some boiling water. You want 4 Tablespoons of alum powder for each pound of wool you are going to mordant and enough water so the piece of wool will have enough room to move around in the water.
For simplicity, I used tap water. However, the results of this process can vary based on the hardness / softness of your tap water. If you have it available, you could rain water to remove this variable. I don’t mind the variable. I think it is fun to see what happens when I try something new like this!
My wool has been pre-felted so I don’t need to worry about shocking the wool if I put cold wool in a pot of hot water. If your wool isn’t already felted and you don’t want it to felt, don’t add cold wool to hot water!
After the alum powder was dissolved, I added my wet wool to the pot and let it simmer for about one hour, stirring regularly.
I let the wool cool and rinsed it thoroughly.
Preparing the Dye:
You want to have twice as much (in weight) carrot tops as wool. I am going to dye one half pound of felted wool, so I want to have one pound of carrot tops.
I used some kitchen shears to chop up the carrot tops into small pieces.
I put the carrot tops in my stainless steel stock pot that I use for dyeing and I covered the carrot tops with water. I brought this mixture to a simmer and let it simmer for two hours.
After the mixture was cool, I strained out the carrot tops so I was left with just the colored dye water.
I then added the wool to this dye liquid, stirred it, and brought it to a simmer. I let it simmer about two hours until the wool had taken the color.
I let everything cool and then rinsed the wool and hung it up to dry.
On the left is the color I started with and on the right is the dyed wool.
You might also like our other wool dye experiments.
Pin this Natural Dye Tutorial:
