Dyeing with avocado

Using this site as inspiration, I decided to try dyeing with avocado. But first, I had to *eat* enough avocado, not easy for me. I found that mixing avocado with lime juice (one lime per avocado) created a kind of guac that actually keeps a day or two in the fridge if the surface is protected from air with saran wrap. Definitely needs salt, though.

Unmordanted on left, rhubarb leaf mordanted on right

I stored the cleaned peels and pits in the freezer until I had accumulated enough for the dye pot, in this case from 5 avocados. On day one, I simmered them for three hours, then let the dye bath sit overnight. The next day I strained the dye bath, soaked both skeins in the room-temperature dye bath for an hour, then raised the temperature and simmered for an hour. After turning off the heat, I let the yarn sit in the bath overnight.

Mordanted with rhubarb leaf

Apparently, the pits have tannin in them, so no mordant is required. So one skein was unmordanted, but the other had been previously mordanted with rhubarb leaf. The results are close, but the color of the rhubarb leaf mordanted one looks a bit deeper.

Unmordanted

The end results turned out more brown than pink. This could be from several different causes: dye materials not clean enough, dye materials kept in freezer too long, the dyer was not careful about keeping the dye bath temp at a low enough simmer, the yarn was kept in the dye bath too long, etc. I plan to repeat this experiment with cleaner dye materials and keep a better eye on the dye bath temp, to see if I get shades of pink. I may experiment with separating the pits and peels, to see if each produces a different result.