Dandelions. I love them.
They have received very bad press and I don’t know why. They are really quite pretty, the way the petals arrange themselves. Only their obvious and blatant success at reproducing has earned them their bad name. If they were difficult to grow we would rush to garden centers to buy them and we would join societies with monthly meetings dedicated to propogating them. Having said all that, I picked about 150 of the flowers and stems and made a dye out of them.
The wool on the left was dyed with the dandelions and turned out pale yellow. The wool on the right is a sample of the wool before dying. It is handspun and mordanted in alum and cream of tartar. I think, had the dye bath been stronger, I would have got a stronger colour.
