Walnut Dye: Whole Husk on Linen

I am insatiably curious about things, especially arts and crafty type things. The Spouse came in and told me that the Walnut tree in the neighbour's yard was dropping lots of nuts this year. When we first moved here I told him I wanted to try making dye from the walnut husks, but the last few years there were no, or few, nuts. So I jumped at the chance to try making dye for linen using the nuts.

I have not found a single source that suggests walnut husks were used in period for dye. I do know that Walnuts originated in Turkey and have spread from there. I also know that early people's were not shy about trying everything in nature to make dye and occasionally ink. Walnuts, all species, have a great deal of tannin in the green husk that surrounds the nut. It is also a source of natural iodine.If you crush the husks your hands will get stained a light orange. The longer your expose your fingers the darker the stain gets so it is reasonable to think that the Romans, Byzantine, Early Medieval, and Medieval people took note of this effect and used it to its fullest effect.

Locally, we have the North American native Black Walnut. Like its Middle Eastern cousins, the fleshy outer husk starts out a bright green but quickly begins to turn black if it is bruised in any way. It is also a favourite food of the North American squirrels who are more than happy to find  stash assembled by some foolish human. If they think about it, they probably just assume that they have found the poorly hidden stash of another squirrel and quickly liberate the nuts for themselves.

The process starts by collecting enough nuts to create your dye. Since we had a plethora of nuts this year I decided I was going to make two types of dye. One made with the crushed husks and one made from the whole nuts. I sorted through the collection and chose 14 nuts that were nut bruised, crushed, or otherwise damaged. I placed the nuts in a small enameled pan and covered them with hot tap water. They were placed on the stove and simmered for 4 hours, until the nuts started turning a dark greenish brown.

We strained the solids out of the liquid using a nylon straining bag I use when making jelly. I knew it was going to be stained but I didn't care. The colour of the bag will not affect its ability to strain juice from fruit later. I made sure to squeeze as much of the liquid as possible form the solids without crushing the whole nuts, so that the colour of the dye was not changed by the internal flash of the walnuts.

At this point the dye was ready for use. I decided to test four strips of white linen. A quick hot dip, a 20 minute boil, a 1 hour boil, and once the liquid was cooled down completely, a cold dip. The dyed strips were then allowed to dry completely overnight before I did the wash tests. The picture below shows the results of the dyeing and wash testing of the pieces of linen. The piece of linen in the centre is the original colour of the linen.

The top left column is the cold dipped linen. The top right column is the hot dip. The bottom left is the 20 minute boil The final column is the 1 hour boil.

The picture should be large enough for you to read the notes but just in case it is not:
1) The top piece in each column is the linen dyed and dried only.
2) The second piece was rinsed in cold water only. The rinse water did change colour a little.
3) The third piece was washed and rinsed in cold water with detergent. Again there was a slight discoloration of the wash water but not the rinse water.
4) The final piece was washed in hot water with detergent and rinsed in cold water. There was the same level of discolouration to the wash water but again none to the rinse water.

My conclusions are that:
1) Whole walnut husk dye is wash permanent.
2) Whole husk dye gives you a lovely olive green which gets darker the longer the boil it.
3)Light to dark tan can be achieved using the cold or hot dip. I presume the colour will be darker the longer the linen is left in the dye.

I want to collect more of the unbruised nuts and dye enough linen to make a pair of pants, a tunic, and some trim. I don't think that will be this year so I hope that the nut crop is large again next year.