One of the easiest natural dyes to use must surely be the good old humble onion skin! Maybe that’s why I put off trying them out for so long, or maybe it’s just that it had taken me this long to amass a decent quantity of the dry skins, but I finally got around to dyeing up a couple of skeins of yarn. And I wish I’d done it before!

Looking around at other peoples’ results, it seems the colour you get from yellow onions skins and red onions skins is very different, and one day it would be fun to do a batch of each and see how they compare. But for this experiment I used a mixture – probably more yellow than red, but who’s counting, right? When I weighed what I had, there was 84g which I reckoned should be more than enough to dye 100g of yarn.

Not only are onions skins the most easily available plant material to try natural dyeing with, but they’re also the most faff-free. Most people say you don’t need to mordant your yarn first (although I did), and you can get a really strong dye bath from relatively little raw material and minimal simmering/soaking time.

I simmered mine gently in water to cover for an hour – boiling the skins can muddy the colour. Let it cool and strained off the skins. The dye bath at this point was very strongly coloured, a gorgeous deep amber red that stained my wooden spoon, my hands (yes, I forgot the plastic gloves… ), and the worktop where it splashed. Oops. I dropped in 2 50g skeins of yarn and left them to simmer gently for another hour.

Result – a beautiful, deep vibrant golden yellow. The deepest and most golden yellow of anything I’ve experimented with to date. Love it! Several of the websites I’d looked at said they had managed to get a moss green by treating the onion-dyed yarn with an iron modifier and as I’m yet to a achieve a proper green I decided to try this with one of my skeins. I didn’t get moss green, but I did get a nice dark olive/khaki. I’m happy with that

Weight of dye-stuff: approx 84g
Weight of yarn: 100g
Mordant: 10g alum
Modifier: 1 cup iron water