Apple Leaves

My Cox's Orange Pippin is now in full leaf, so I decided to try dyeing with the leaves, to see what colours I would obtain. Jenny Dean's 'Wild Colours' (My Bible) suggests that one can expect shades of mustard and brown, depending on the time of year when the leaves are collected.

The dye bath (steeped overnight on a very slow heat) looked rather weak, and an unpromising yellow, when I looked at a spoonful. I obtained some quite subtle shades, through. They make an interesting comparison with the stronger, though not dissimilar, shades I obtained from the apple pruning in January. The set of leaf-dyed skeins are uppermost, mordanted, (from the left) with alum, copper, alum + iron and alum + tin; the lower set are the results from pruning, mordanted (again, from the left) with alum, copper, and rather confusingly with alum + iron and then alum + tin.