Dyeing Wool Yarn with Avocado Skins
Note before reading: This blog was written in 2018, when I was studying for my MA (hence the Harvard referencing!). Where needed, I have edited these posts to correct any factual inaccuracies. This post was last edited Jan 2025.
Learn to dye with avocado skins or stones in a natural dyeing workshop!
Dyeing with avocado skins and stones seems to be quite trendy at the moment, and with the surprising, dusky 'millennial' pink tones they produce, I'm not surprised. I am slightly concerned about their sustainability, with recent articles suggesting that:
"...the unprecedented international appetite for this unique fruit is indirectly fuelling illegal deforestation and environmental degradation." (Blythman, 2016, online)
But, if you do eat avocados occasionally, then it would make sense to utilise every part of the fruit and retain the skins and the stones for dyeing. I've been storing them in the freezer, adding the cleaned stones and skins when they appear in the kitchen.
In this experiment, I simmered just the skins for an hour, before leaving the liquid to cool and straining. I then added the pre-mordanted wool and simmered for 45 minutes, leaving to cool overnight.
The resulting colour was a very dusky, almost coral shade of pink. I'll be interested to see if the stones yield the same colour or a different shade of pink - apparently they make a truer pink shade!
Burns, R. Avocado skin dye 4. Photograph,
References:
Blythman, J. 2016. Can hipsters stomach the unpalatable truth about avocado toast? [online] Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/12/hispters-handle-unpalatable-truth-avocado-toast [Accessed 2 February 2018].
Burns, R. 2018. Avocado Skin Dye 1-4. Photograph.