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Well I have now felted a small amount of it, and am hoping to get some needle felting on top of that, any thoughts on how easy it is to natural dye fleece and some easy ones to start me off, please.

Onion skins are one of the easiest and need no mordant
Stew up quantities of brown or red onion skins, strain, add your fleece - or skeined spun wool, stew up again till you like the colour.
If you soak the wool/fleece in water with vinegar or add vinegar or lemon juice to the dyepot it will turn a more orangey shade
No vinegar it ends up more shades of burnt sienna.
Remove your wool and rinse it, add more wool to the pot in case there's more dye in there you can get progressively lighter shades.
Or if you have wool skeined you could start the skein off stewing and then lift part of it out and put a stick through it (across the top of the pan) and end up with a shaded skein of wool.
Use a stainless or enamel pan (not sure what the difference would be using aluminium pan as I can't find mine)

Dear Red, sorry I havent done my part of the wool cleaning feature - not very good at getting the words right as you can see. I do have some pics of cleaning and onion skin dyeing which I'll try to host through yahoo as I dont have anywhere else to put them now.

Turmeric gives lovely bright yellows - with no mordant.
But don't add it loose like I did and have loads of turmeric dust to card out
- I think the guidance is to tie it in a muslin bag and soak in the water, then bring the water up to heat to release the colour, remove the bag when the water is well yellow and add wool, stew until nice colour, remove and rinse.

OOh sounds great, thanks for that , now do I card the fleece before dying for felting , or is it best dyed then carded? Possibly for crochet it would be better carded then spun then dyed?

I'd dye it as fleece or as spun skeins, much easier to deal with - if you dye carded fibre it will need fluffing again to spin.
onionskins and vinegar on fleece


can someone tell me if that is viewable please?

Yet again thank you, I couldn't view the photos without joinig the group HTH

i think i managed to get a pic up now - from left onion, onion leftovers, control, and mahonia (oregon grape - wood)


and those beautifully spun skeins are not my spinning they were a bargain on ebay, rug wool

snapdragon wrote: Dear Red, sorry I havent done my part of the wool cleaning feature - not very good at getting the words right as you can see. I do have some pics of cleaning and onion skin dyeing which I'll try to host through yahoo as I dont have anywhere else to put them now.

nothing wrong with your words - they are fine! and the pictures are great. I've yet to try the onion skin dyeing.. although I gather you need a lot of onion skins so we have been saving them up this past year!

Perhaps this bit about dyeing could be used in the article too. Dunno..while just hand it to Andy. But good to know our efforts are being used already!

Words are fine! - Shall I go through and piece together an article from what it there or is there more to come?

Andy Hamilton wrote:Words are fine! - Shall I go through and piece together an article from what it there or is there more to come?

make an article I reckon - witht eh usual disclaimers about on your on head beit if you scold yourself etc :)

What fabulous colours. I tried the onion skins but think I need a few more next time as only a faint tinge of brown, but it is lovely. Thanks everyone