I was recently in California (feb 2020) and gathered about 300g of blue gum eucalyptus leaves for my first eucalyptus dyeing experience. I did equal weight fiber to dye, a small 15g test batch and followed Babs Behan’s recipe: I broke up the leaves into small bits and simmered them with my Denver tap water for 3 hours, then let them cool in the pot overnight. The next day I strained the leaves, then divided the bath into two small pots (this came to about 4-5 cups of water in each) I added 1 TBS of homemade iron mordant solution to one pot, and cold immersed a 7g strip of (scoured, unmordanted repurposed cotton) into the bath. The grey sample above is the iron + eucalyptus cotton cold immersion overnight in the dye bath. I took half of this sample and heated the iron + euc. Bath for 30 minutes, let that sit overnight, and it was barely distinguishable to the shorter, cold immersion bath. The warm khaki I got is the eucalyptus by itself, I heated that bath for 30 minutes, then let cool overnight with fabric immersed. Washed, rinsed, dried.
The final photo is a rainbow of fabrics from later dyes, ranching from no iron added (just Euc. on the right) to increasing levels of iron in the dye bath (which was also decreasing levels of euc.)
