Autumn Dye Day: Pomegranate Rinds

This season I made just one quick dye bath. I was looking for a light yellow to make some new linen pillow covers for my couch throw pillows, and I wanted to learn about a dye that I hadn’t worked with yet while I was trying to get to that colour.

I bought the dried and ground pomegranate rinds from Maiwa Supply (available here). I’ve seen others do this with fresh rinds, which I might play with in the future, but for now the ground rinds seemed like a better way to get consistent colour that wouldn’t be too light. I’m also already saving up avocado skins in my freezer and dried onion skins on my counter and I only have so much space for dye scraps in my little apartment!

I was dying both cellulose (linen & cotton) and protein (silk) fibres this time so I went through the separate scouring and mordanting processes given by Maiwa (available here) for the two different types of fibres. Both types were mordanted with alum at 15% weight of fabric. I made my pomegranate dye bath with the dye stuff measured at 10% weight of fabric. After about 1 hour I took out everything from the bath and added a 1/2 tsp of iron directly to the bath. After mixing that in I added back the fibres that I wanted to be a darker green/grey colour and rinsed everything else. After I had the colour I wanted from the iron bath I rinsed everything and followed the rest of the instructions from Maiwa (I let my fibres rest 2 weeks before washing with soap).

The colours turned out beautiful, although the yellows have more of a mustard coloured tone than I expected. The cotton sashiko thread I dyed I’m going to use to hand quilt the linen for my cushion covers, and the two silks will hopefully become some really luxurious linings for a couple winter skirts I’m working on sewing.