As mentioned in my previous post, my newest experiment in natural dyeing was using leaves from the crab apple tree in my front yard.

I got this idea from a natural dyer who lives in the United Kingdom and has a blog named Imagine Jem. A friend of mine here is the US is a friend of this blogger and sent me the link to the blog when she saw my posts on natural dyeing! Love it!

Any way, this UK dyer had dyed yarn using an assortment dyes she made from an apple tree—bark, leaves and core + skin. She had gotten a beautiful yellow dye using the leaves from her apple tree. I haven’t made and yellow dyes yet, and I needed to do some pruning of my crab apple tree, so I decided to see if I could make a yellow dye bath.

Well, no. I didn’t get a yellow dye. But I did get a beautiful warm pink dye which is my favorite pink natural dye so far!

Just for comparison, here is a piece of fabric dyed with avocado pits and one with the crab apple leaves.

Avocado pit at the top and the slightly warmer pink crab tree dye at the bottom

And for the first time, I’ve dyed some natural cotton pearl cotton yarn which I plan to use for my next tablet weaving project. This yarn was a bleached white. As with my fabric dyeing, I soaked the yarn in a diluted soy milk bath overnight and let it dry. My dye bath was already 3 days old, so I didn’t let they yarn cure for a week after the soy bath. That my affect the color fastness of the dyed yarn, but that’s ok. This is all an experiment.

Cotton yarn dyed with leaves from my crab apple tree

The best thing about this warm pink dye is that half of the year I have access to crab apple tree leaves! Or at least I should. The leaves have some sort of nasty scab on them this year. Time to call the arborist to see if they know what it is and if it will cause any long term damage to my tree. (It turned out to be cedar apple rust and which my aborist tells me doesn’t harm the tree).