Acorn Dyeing - April 2025
So now that the soymilk has had (ample) time to bond with the fibres. It’s time to make an acorn dye. Good thing it’s acorn season where I live.
What I love about natural dyeing, is being able to collect the dyestuffs from plants in my local environment, often from weeds, invasive species or unwanted plant matter. Acorns are a fantastic example of this. In late autumn and early winter, the street trees around here drop carpets of acorns. We’ve got a couple of different species of oak planted as street trees in Canberra. The ones I used this time were from Quercus canariensis, Algerian oak.
People really resent the fact that oak trees drop acorns and leaves. Skill issue, they are missing out. I absolutely love that our local possums and parrots feed on the acorns all winter, you get flocks of cockatoos and galahs and king parrots making the streets all bright and alive even when everything is grey and dead looking. Also the fallen leaves make amazing mulch and compost, but I digress.
I walked around the corner from my home and spent about 10 minutes collecting acorns from the ground. I used gloves and I filled a shopping bag.
When I got them home, I spent a bit of time sorting out random twigs and rocks and things.
Then I gave them a wash, which also helped to remove random extra bits of ground
Last time I did this, I used a brick or a hammer to crush the acorns. This time I decided not to bother, and let heat alone extract the tannins.
I boiled the acorns, outside on my portable hotplate, in plenty of water, for about 24 hours. I had it simmering whenever I was home, and turned it off and covered it whenever I went out. At the end of that time it was a nice, rich dark colour. I let it cool until it was safe to handle and strained out the acorns.
I then added my dress, and let it simmer for a couple of hours. When I took it out of the dye pot, I put in a silk shirt, plus a skein of wool that I had dyed previously and wasn’t happy with. I need to be much more careful of the temperature when dyeing wool, so it made sense to dye the cotton dress first, and then treat the temperature sensitive things separately. I had a go at dip dyeing the silk shirt, for a two tone effect. Unfortunately I ended up getting dye on the area I was trying to leave undyed, because it was touching the lid.
The good news is that the dye took really well to the cotton dress with soy mordant. Another type of mordant you can use for dyeing is alum – potassium alum sulphate. Alum gets used as a food preservative, which is why it can be used for natural dyeing, because it’s largely non-toxic. It also gets used in… underarm deodorant! The bad news is that this was a second hand dress. And the previous owner must have used an aluminium based underarm deodorant. Because I got an accidental extra mordant effect in the armpit area. With acorn dye, alum tends to shift the colour to a yellowish-green. I got a yellow-green armpit dress!
Two things I could have done to prevent this: One – mordant the whole thing with alum, so that the armpit area wasn’t noticeable. Bit annoying because I wasn’t going for yellow-green.
I could also have tried to scour the armpit area with washing soda. Don’t exactly know if this will work, but I hope I remember to try it next time.
I did try to give the whole thing a post-dye treatment in alum. But by then it was too late, and it didn’t do anything.
The acorn dye also didn’t do anything to cover the bleach stain. Makes sense, bleach is pretty hard to cover up, but it was worth a try.
I’m really sad about it, but I think I’m going to throw the dress away! I tried, but I just don’t have the energy to keep on trying to fix it. I learned a lot, I’m really happy that the soy milk worked. And I loved doing the acorn dye. It’s a lot of work to do an acorn dye bath, so I’m glad I have the silk shirt and my skein of wool from this session.
