Black Eyed Susan

Description

Black Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) is a North American coneflower, a perennial that readily self sows, and a strong attractor to pollinators. We love its cheery bright yellow and near black, velvety center eyes.

The color yield from Black Eyed Susan is surprising and exciting. With a dye bath that is pH neutral, wool dyes a beautiful soft green with alum, and a dark brown-olive with iron mordant.

For our samples, we used 1:1 Black Eyed Susan to wool gauze weight of fabric (meaning for every gram of fabric, we weighed out a gram of flowers), added the flowers to water, then heated the flowers and water for about 45 minutes. The flowers are light and bulky, so it took a little time for them to hydrate and release their color. After that, we strained the flowers out of the dye bath, kept the liquid and added wool gauze to the liquid, which was our dye bath.  We dyed for about 1 hour, then let the fabric steep in the dye bath overnight.  Please note that we usually recommend longer times for obtaining darker shades, but we saw how strong this dyestuff was and shortened our dye times.  The leftover flowers have plenty of color in them and can be extracted with more water again.

Protein fibers such as wool achieve a luminous yellow-green.  Plant fibers such as cotton will be a lighter shade and may benefit from longer dye times.

The wool was mordanted at 15% aluminum potassium sulfate, and the darker wool sample was mordanted with iron only, at 2%.  Check our instructions for iron mordant and for mordanting with aluminum potassium sulfate.

Sold in 50 gram packages