Courtesean Gown: Dye Job

Mmmm.....tastey! That's a simmering pot o' onion skins!

My pasta pot holds 2.5 yards of velveteen.... Convenient.

Funny, that doesn't *look* yellow....

The finished color -- behind the pink, and above the yellow. I now have the full color palette for this gown!

02.27.02 - Well, since Jenny started dying fabric with practically every natural thing she could get her hands on, I've been itching to try doing a bit of that myself. Natural dying is an odd, nearly mystical art to me.... All this business with mordents and fixatives and scouring and associated hoopla sounds ... Well, it sounds hard. And since I seem to exist to prove that anything can be done the wrong way with decent success (I'm kinda like Trading Spaces that way), I decided to skip all the hard complicated stuff and just dye some fabric. :)

Actually, I was working with onion skins, so it's not really the brave feat it sounds like. Onion skins are a time honored way of producing a nice, cheery yellow (if you're lucky) or a weird, muddy yellow (if you're not). Since I wanted a mustard color, and I generally run shy on luck, I figured I couldn't lose. (You should know what the end of this story is already....) Now, i've read a couple things about dying with onion skins. The first was a short story we read in third grade about a bunch of people who had been moved to siberia for some reason (that I think they story revolved around) and for one reason or another, the author felt it was important to mention that they dyed their horridly depressing window curtain from white to yellow with onion skins that the entire community collected for absolutely weeks, and my teacher felt it was important for this to be a question on our quiz. I swear, the *weirdest* things stick with you.... The most recent thing I read on the matter was a book that I had no intention of buying at borders last friday, which advised that you maybe didn't so much need a mordant, but you definitely needed twice as much weight in onion peels as you had fabric. Now, I don't know if you've ever considered the weight of an onion peel before... But they're pretty light. I mean, really, twice the weight of my fabric? I don't think so. Hrmph.

So I took the peels from two bags of onions (that's about three pounds of onions or so), plus some that I had grabbed from mom's house (skins, not onions), and that was no where near twice the weight of my fabric. Anyway, the skins went into my great big pasta pot (serves 6 with enough left to put up about 6 quart jars) with a lot of water, and then some boiling water courtesy of my tea kettle (there are faster ways to heat a large amount of water, but I have never had a kettle that actually whistles before and I still can't get over the fact that they really do whistle, just like you hear in movies, so I use the silly thing whenever I can -- drives the cats batty), brought the whole mess up to a boil, then let it simmer for the rest of the day - 8 or 9 hours - until it was reduced by half. Then I scooped all the onion skins out with a random kitchen utensil (I don't know what the thing is called -- it's like a very flat spoon, with lots of little holes in it. It was clearly designed for scooping *something* out of a pot....), put the skins into a bowl, and proceeded to ring them out, all the while thinking, "I'm an intelligent person with some education.... Why an I wringing out parboiled onion skins?" Sometimes, you have to wonder about your life... We're getting close to the exciting bit - next I rinsed the bejezus out of 2.5 yards of white velveteen, wrung it out, and threw it (carefully) into the dye vat, whereupon it promptly turned ... orange. What? Ok, maybe that washes out some, right? I tried being good and stirring the (still simmering) by with a wooden stick of the kitchen persuasion, but things kept sloshing precariously, so I switched to using my hands to turn the fabric. Don't do this. The water is hot. (Please note: I am a trained professional. I'm not kidding - I used to work in a bagel shop, where I had the inspiring job title of "kettler". see, bagels get boiled before they get baked, when done properly, which means that some fool gets paid to dump about 4 dozen uncooked bagels at a crack into a vat of boiling water (you jearm to jump backwards very quickly), stir them a bit, then fish them out with a giant metal thingy. There are always one or two that get stuck. It's a law of he bagel gods or something. The kettler, aka fool, aka broke college student, aka *me* then has to reach into the vat and grab them. After a while, they gave me a pair of food service latex gloves, which did help take the sting out of the whole experience. The point is that I ended up with a relative immunity to hot water in my fingers. It's one of a number of truly bizarre jobs skills I've picked up.) So, anyway, while standing in my kitchen, at midnight, up to my elbows in simmering dye bath, I remember thinking, "Whoa.... It's dying my hands!" I really don't know why that surprised me. I mean, it's not like it wasn't dye or something....

The fabric stayed in the dye about 40 minutes or so, till I got bored, then I wrang it out as well as I could and rinsed the remaining bejezus out of it. Oddly, it never did get around to being the yellow it was supposed to be. I'm boggled. According to the book Wild Color, I should have had to do way more intense stuff to get anything approaching the color I got out of mere onion skins. *shrug* It's a lovely sort of orangey tawny color, though, and I think it goes well with the rest of the colors for the dress. That's what you get for leaving things in the hands of the costume gods, I guess.... It's not all bad. :)