Dyeing yarn with Avocado skins
If you are interested in dyeing yarn with avocado skins and other plants, I run online yarn dyeing workshops where I will show you how to dye British wool yarn a range of vibrant colours. Cick here to read more!
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 freezing them. and 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 premordanted 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.
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.
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