Walnut Dye: Crushed Husk on Linen

For this Walnut dye experiment I went with the crushed, cut up, husks to make the dye. The progression of pictures shows all the major steps but I will go over them.

1) Collect and cut the husks off of the nuts. The squirrels love this part because the nuts are ready for them to munch on after you have filled your pot.

2) Cover the husk pieces with water and let it soak overnight. The water actually turns brown very quickly, but all the pages I found says you get a better dye if you allow the husks to oxidize overnight.

3) Boil the pot of husks until they are very soft and the water is very dark.

4) Strain out all the big pieces. Note to self, three gallons of cut up husks makes a whole lot of liquid. You can see in the photo that the husks turned into a grainy mush at the bottom of the pan. The one 1800's book I referenced called this "soil" and I know why. It looks like black earth in the bottom of the pan. I threw this gunk away but I am wondering now if I should have used it as a mulch around my blueberry bushes.

5) Continue to cook the strained mixture. This is the point where I did my hot dip, 20 minute boil, and 1 hour boil dye tests. After it cooled overnight is when I did my cold dip test.

6) Since the Spouse wants to try making ink with walnut juice we strained the liquid again the next day, using a very fine muslin bag as the strainer, and put the resulting liquid in jars. The Spouse mixed this two parts to one alcohol to preserve the liquid.

7) And finally my dye swatches. The photo looks more green than it actually is. I took the photo inside under LED lights so the colour is not correct. The swatches are actually four shades of a rich brown. Starting at the top left we have Cold Dip, Hot Dip, 20 Minute Boil, and 1 Hour Boil.

Each column consists of four pieces: Dried, Cold Rinsed, Cold Wash with detergent, and Hot Wash with Detergent/ Cold Rinse. There was a very small amount of water discoloration at the beginning of each wetting process, but the rinse waters cleared quickly. I like the brown dyes the cut up husks makes and can see making clothes dyed in this for use in the SCA.

I am also going to make dye using crushed husked and some rusted metal. Not only do I want to see how that changes the colours but I also want to see if it makes the dye more or less permanent. I am going to hang all the swatches in a sunny South facing window to test the lightfastness of the walnut dyes.