Thursday 22 June 2017

St John's Wort Flowers

I'm getting back into a regular routine again, after my break from four skein dyeing. Jenny Dean says that one specific variety of the plant, Hypericum perforatum, produces four different shades of red, green, reddish-maroon and yellow, if the flowers are treated in a particular way. I did not read the text sufficiently carefully, so I simmered my flowers for several hours, before checking with the instructions and realising that the flowers from my variety of Hypericum would never yield a deep red liquid, however long I simmered them, because they were from an ordinary Hypericum, of the variety 'Hidcote'. However, I did obtain some pretty yellowish tan shades: from the left mordanted with alum, copper, alum + tin and alum + iron.

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