I recently dyed a number of skeins with avocado skins and wanted to share my process and results. I should say at the outset that my purpose here was not to systematically experiment with different aspects of the dyeing process. My only goal here was to dye various skeins of my handspun that were white and undyed. Additionally, I tend to prefer rich saturated colours, so I knew going in that I wanted a high ratio of weight of dye stuffs to weight of fibre to maximize the depth of shade. Because I don't have the space or capacity to purchase and store separate pots and utensils for using commercial acid dyes, I have chosen to work only with natural dyes and food-safe mordants at this time.
For quite a while I have been setting aside avocado skins whenever we used them in our kitchen, and storing them in a freezer bag. I should note that both the skins and the pits can produce a dye, but for this first time, I chose to only use the skins. In the future I will save some of the pits as well and see how that changes the results. The skins can be stored either by freezing or drying. I live in a very humid area, and I felt that freezing was likely to have the best results. Once I had approximately 700 g of skins, I decided it was time to give it a try. I ultimately dyed close to 400 g of yarn, but I did it in two separate dye baths, which gave me one skein that was much more saturated than the others.
I did all of my dyeing in my Instant Pot, because that allowed me to leave the skins and the skeins soaking overnight without tying up my stove top for several days. First I placed all of the avocado skins into the Instant Pot and filled it with water. I turned on the Keep Warm setting and let that stew for about an hour. Then I turned the Instant Pot off, and brought the inner pot over to the sink. I proceeded to carefully scrape the remnants of green flesh from the inside of each of the skins - this was very time consuming, but I knew that leaving this flesh would affect the dye process and result in a colour that was more brown than pink (green plus red equals what?). Next time, I wouldn't heat the skins before doing this - there was unfortunately quite a lot of colour in the pot already when I began this process. My thinking was to warm the skins up before beginning to clean them, because they were frozen and I thought this would make it easier to remove the green flesh. I don't think this made any difference in the time it took, and I think I lost some of the colour to this process. After painstakingly scraping the skins clean and rinsing, I then refilled the pot with filtered water and set the Instant Pot back on Keep Warm, with the lid sealed. I left this on for a full day, turning off the power overnight but leaving the lid sealed, which preserved a lot of the heat. I had read that allowing both the dye stuffs and the skeins to sit for long periods of time would result in the best colour payoff, so that is what I did! I also read that using high heat could cause the colour to come out more brown, which is why I only used the Keep Warm function rather than Saute or Pressure Cook. Occasionally I would flip the Saute function on to increase the heat, but I don't think this was necessary and I won't bother with it next time.
After letting the skins stew overnight, I turned off the pot and removed the lid, allowing them to cool to room temperature. While this was happening, I took my first skein, 100 g of wool and mohair handspun, and soaked it in tap water for about 30 minutes. I chose not to use a mordant, because I had read that the high tannins in avocado skins made mordanting optional for protein fibres like wool and silk. I also wanted to see how it would work without a mordant to compare in the future. While the skein was soaking, I carefully removed the avocado skins from the dye bath and strained as much of the pieces out as I could. Later I realised that there were still some chunks remaining, but it didn't seem to affect the process at all. I then took the soaked skein and submerged it in the dye bath. I turned the Instant Pot back onto Keep Warm, sealed the lid, and repeated the process of leaving it overnight, turning the heat off at night and back on in the morning. Roughly 24 hours later, I turned off the heat, removed the lid, and allowed the skein and the liquid to come to room temperature. I noted that there was still quite a lot of colour in the dye bath, so I grabbed three other skeins (about 250 g of linen/silk handspun, and a small sample skein of wool/silk) and began soaking them as well.
Once I removed the original wool and mohair skein, I placed it in a sink of lukewarm water to rinse. It took several rinses for the water to come back clear. At that time, I placed the three remaining skeins in the dye bath and repeated the whole process of heating overnight and rinsing out the next day. In the end, I still had quite a bit of colour in the dye bath, so I saved this water in a freezer bag for future dyeing. I can see myself overdyeing some of the skeins in the future, and it would be nice to combine different dye stuffs to get more complex colours.
I have included several pictures below showing the three skeins (as the fourth skein was just more of the silk/linen blend), comparing the colour of the three, as well as showing pictures of what the undyed versions looked like. I have tried to colour correct so that the colour is as accurate as possible. I would describe the wool/mohair skein (the only one in the first dye bath) as a warm salmon pink, although the temperature of the colour appears slightly different in different lighting - this skein is noticeably more saturated than the others. The wool/silk blend comes across as a warm blush pink with hints of bronze, while the silk/linen feels like more a of true bronze (both of these skeins were together in the second dye bath). All of the skeins have a dusty feel, and are not particularly vibrant or vivid, as is common with naturally dyed materials. I have not included individual image descriptions (although each image has a title and alt text), because I feel that this paragraph description conveys the images most accurately.
Have you dyed with avocado skins, or with other natural dyes? I would love to know your thoughts on how the weight of skins that you used, and the fibre types you worked with.
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