Welcome! Velkomin! Wilkommen! Bienvenue!





Thursday, November 10, 2011

Dyeing yarn with Roiboos-tea and coffee

In front: coffee grounds-yarn; in the back: roiboos tea-yarn

The perfect thing for me during wintertime, while nature is "sleeping" is to experiment a bit with things I have in my kitchen shelfs and yarn :-)
This time I tryed out some old roiboos-lemon-tea (leaves) and coffee grounds. One of the many good things about tea and coffee-yarn-dyeing is that you don´t have to use any kind of mordant - a good thing for nature! I didn´t have very much coffee grounds so I just dyed a small amount of yarn to see what happens. The yarn I dyed is icelandic, and called "einband" - it´s laceweight and the perfect for shawls or really thin clothing.

Result:
I really liked how both colours turned out. The tea-yarn became yellow-orange - but if you use black tea you get a totally different colour: surprise... brown like a cup of tea!!
The coffee-grounds-colour was a nice, soft brown - but I´d like to try using a larger amount of coffee to see if I get a darker tone.

Roiboos tea
Roiboos tea

coffee grounds

4 comments:

  1. Flottir litir!! Mér finnst svona litir vera svo fallegir og nátturulegir. Ég er rosalega mikill áðdáandi lita nátturunnar!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Aeðislegt! Ég er sérstaklega hrifin af þessum gula.....sörpraes sörpraes!;)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hello Kristin :) Thanks for visiting my blog and for your nice comments.

    What great colours you have achieved! I like them very much.
    Over the last two years I have been experimenting with dyeing with plant materials, but have never tried dyeing with coffee or tea. It sounds like a fun idea to try :)

    I'm so happy to have found your blog. Love your knitting, and is very excited to hear about your dyes. I'm looking forward to following your blog :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi there Hilde! Thank YOU for your nice comment! :-) So glad to hear that you like what I´m doing and writing! :-) Coffee and tea is so much fun to dye with, because you have it at home and you don´t need any mordant! :-) AND the colours are really nice!

    ReplyDelete