As fall approaches, Ihave begun to look for a new source of “fresh from the tree” Black Walnuts to make an easy over-dye
This link is to a pretty decent overview of the process frm Tree to Tee
http://www.practicalprimitive.com/skillofthemonth/blackwalnutdye.html
Hope you find it helpful
Wheat
@wheat I see you are in Maryland… Is Wardensville, WV far from you? (It’s on Google Maps.)
We have a grove with 850 walnut trees. They may be English walnuts (I’ll have to ask my husband, he planted them in the 1970s). We also have wild walnut trees, hence the name of the farm is “Walnut Hill.”
I’m away right now but I could mail you some when I get home. Or, if harvesting is time sensitive, I could send you a private message with the address if you aren’t too far away and you could gather your own.
July 14,2012, we had a tornado come through town, it wasn’t much of a tornado, but it went right through town. About 2 blocks from me. We got a new roof out of it, lol. Anyway, every leaf, every pecan came off of my trees. (It was the beginning of the end for my plum tree, poor thing never recovered, we had to cut it down a couple of weeks ago)The pecans were maybe an inch long, I was sooooo sad. They usually grow to almost 2 inches long! I live off of pecans (low carb, gluten free). I gathered them all up, put them in big gallon jars with water and white vinegar and let them sit for about a week on the end of my porch where they got sun, and really warm. I then filtered the liquid out, reserving it. I had just spun some weird seaweed silk/cormo blend yarn that was white, and I soaked it in water with some vinegar in it. I put the yarn back in the gallon jars, poured the now really brown liquid over it, and put the lid on, set it in the sun again. In a week, I got the yarn out, rinsed it, and tied it out to dry. It is the coolest pecan brown color. I’ll post a pic of the scarf I made of it. (I think I have one or two skeins left of it, there really wasn’t much of it to work with) Pecan hulls(or the whole thing if a tornado makes every pecan in town come down) make a great brown dye. I can only imagine that walnuts (in the same family) would do the same thing.
k
Great!! I didn’t know you could use hickory nuts. Very interesting. Thanks
You can easily tell the black walnuts from the English walnuts. You can’t get the black ones open with anything short of a sledge hammer! It takes special equipment.
@hellokitten, an acquaintance told me that she remembers her father putting the walnuts on the driveway and running over them with his truck. I bet those were the black ones!
That was a helpful and interesting article; thanks for linking. On a similar note, it is pecan hull dropping season here - the nuts in hulls that fall out of the trees this time of year are not ripe, but maybe I can experiment with them - lots of mentions of dyeing with pecan hulls, leaves, shells, etc. in various blog posts. I have not tried any of these pecan concoctions, but pecan hulls are much easier to find in may area (Houston) than black walnut hulls.