Red Onion Skins

I brought the last of my red onion skins with me for when I want to do some dye printing. I made up a really highly concentrated bath and did some dyeing with it before reserving 2cups in my fridge.

Onion Skin Recipe-- highly concentrated bath

2:1 Ratio

Fill your smallest pot with onion skins. Add barely enough water to cover them. Cook it 35-45 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the skins are getting pale/clear from loosing all their color. Strain, making sure to press on the skins to get all the moisture out. Wet your pre-mordanted fabric (as usual, alum mordanted) before adding it to the bath. I very seriously heated my bath back to a simmer and had it on a scant 5 minutes before my colors were dark enough..... I pulled everything out and added some shibiori'd pieces of silk and wool, and pulled them out almost immediately because they threatened to get too dark. It was at this point I then put some aside for dye printing later.


Top to bottom: Cotton, Cotton with soymilk, wool, silk.

Most awesome thing about it? The brown/purples were separating from the olive greens in this dye bath, as if the colors were different weights. I've had this happen with MX dyes before, but not in this kind of strikingly visible manner with natural dyes. The piece of Shibori'd wool I put in picked up brown on the surface level, green on the inner levels but keeping the resist of the surface, and turned the larger whites to a pale blue. This is over top of the yellows beneath all this. This piece of cloth is so amazingly beautiful I set it aside. When it stops being so cloudy I will photograph it with natural light, because the photos I took indoors do it no justice.