Remember these jars?
They had been fermenting for over a week, and the color of the liquid didn’t change over the last days, so I decided it was time to try them.
The front jar contains the pit and peel from 1 avocado and 1 Tsp salt, the other one the same with the addition of 1 Tsp ammonia. I combined the pit and peel in one dye bath because my earlier attempts didn’t yield different colors with them separated. And this time I blended the pit and peel, carefully and a bit at a time to not destroy the blender.
The much deeper red in the ammonia jar does translate into more color, a reddish brown, on the yarn (in front) than the jar without ammonia (in the back) which just gave the standard beige. Again beige.
No pink this time, maybe because I didn’t heat the avocado before fermentation?
FACTS – AVOCADO PEELS + PITS, BLENDED
Mordant 10% alun
Water Tap
Yarn Supersoft 575 m/100 g
Yarn:Dyestuff ratio 10 g yarn to one avocado
Conclusion Ammonia extracts more color
Possible improvements Boil before fermentation to get pink. Filter out blended avocado before dyeing
At this point, I think it’s fair to say that I have tried a lot of combinations with avocado: fermentation of avocado pits, of the peels, and now blending them together and fermenting them with and without ammonia. I’ve achieved a range of colors from beige over pink into brown.
So I do think this concludes my experimentation with this for now. The only thing that remains to be seen is how light and wash fast this is over a longer time.