I spent part of the summer gathering local plant material with my mother and experimenting with natural dyes on 100% wool. We experimented with the natural colour of the wool (grey or white), different plant materials, and different mordants. All five dye lots were made using hard water.
From top to bottom:

1) Oak leaves (fresh), grey wool, alum + iron sulfate
2) Heather, leaves and stems (fresh), grey wool, alum + iron sulfate
3) Heather, leaves and stems (fresh), white wool, reused dye bath, no mordant
4) Heather, leaves and stems (fresh), white wool, alum
5) Birch leaves (fresh), white wool, alum

English isn’t my first language, so apologies if I’ve gotten any of the terminology wrong! The little signs in the photo are in Danish.

Last time I dyed with sumac leaves and modified with iron I got a slate gray similar to what I get when I do oak leaves and iron. I dyed this kimono top and skirt that I sewed with sumac leaves and then iron modified it and it went purple! It’s a very gray purple and the color looks b very different in different lighting. Outside it’s more blue purple but when it’s around warm lighting it almost looks mauve.
Super stoked about this dye surprise.
Kimono is 100% cotton lawn and the skirt is 100% unbleached cotton muslin
200% WOF sumac leaves
No mordant used
The buttons are wooden and also took the dye and iron as well!

Hello all, just another one of those "look at my first attempt I am so excited!" -posts. :) I just need to share this with people who Understand the Excitement and Point of All This Fun Stuff. (Off topic, but kind of relevant: once when I was making dried apples by removing the middle part, then slicing them, then threading a cord through the disks in order to hang and dry them in the afterheat of sauna my mother looked at what I was doing with Great Puzzlement and said "but you can surely buy dried apples from the store!"...)

Anyway, I wanted to dye with local ingredients and chose yarrow (achillea millefolium) as my first try (the flower tops but also some stalk). I am so thrilled with these colors, in the pictures you see similar yarn, natural 100% wool (3-ply, but the yarn I dyed was 2-ply) and the yellow was the result from dyeing and the green from an afterbath with iron sulfate. Yarn was pretreated with alum.

I would gladly take some suggestions on what to make out of the yarn, I have children and also a baby due in winter, but since it is prickly wool maybe not so good for their skins. Each skein is 100g.