I made some blackberry wine and spilled some. I wiped it up with a towel, and it is now very stained. So I wondered if I could use the spent blackberries after wine making to make dye. I had always just fed them to the critters. So I used information from this site to make a dye. Basically you just simmer then berries and strain them. You pretreated the yarn with alum. Then you add the pretreated yarn to the dye, simmer it and then let it cool in the pot overnight. Here is the dyepot with the yarn in it.
dye pot
Then you wash and rinse the yarn and let it dry. Here is the yarn after drying, photographed in room lighting.
blackberry yarn room light
And here it is in the sunlight (where I think you can see the color a little better).
blackberry yarn sunlight
And here are the hogs still getting to eat the leftover blackberries.
pigs and blackberries
WooHoo! I’m impressed! That’s really beautiful! Do you suppose the wild Himalayan blackberries we have around here would work?
They should work just fine.
That’s a LOVELY muted purple!
Thanks Michelle. I was hoping for a darker purple but I think they are pretty.
WOW! That’s so neat! Any ideas for a project?
Not yet. I may keep it, and I may sell it.
That’s a lovely and subtle shade of purple!
Thanks Tara!