A few moments after I put a bunch of dried purple iris blooms into a jar of hot water! It turned blue almost immediately.
I put silk in it to test, which turned a light grey that faded overnight.
I also painted a bit with the water that turned blue (super dark blue over time) And it turned a blueish purple (Ft a sun I painted with pollen and the grey silk).
Here's where things get interesting. I didn't see much promise in a light grey silk, and I had heard alum+iris can make green paint, so I wanted to see if I could force a lake pigment out of it. The jar on the left of the right photo above is slightly bluer because I added about a teaspoon of alum to it, while the other was untouched but had an iron mordanted silk cake in it.
I know iris pigment changes color depending on pH, and i *suspect* this is because of anthocyanins, but I don't know for sure so don't take my word on that.
Anyways, I do think the alum lake pigment approach would work, as I got a bit out of it, but I ran into a couple problems: One, I ran out of alum, and Two: I didn't have any good filtration system for getting the pigment out. So this will have to be dogeared for another day.
Instead, I simply took the leftover alum water and dipped a paintbrush right in, which yielded a brilliant clear blue that soom faded to a lovely teal as it dried. It's more green than the non-alum water, which makes sense. It's even greener than these photos show! It may even get greener over time, we'll see.
Also of note is some iris leaf cordage I made! My mom pulled up a few irises in a flower bed and I took the biggest leaves from them.
So, I don't know if they're even the most ideal species, and they certainly weren't at the right stage of growth, but I managed to get intact-enough fibers from about half of the ones I collected.
I struggled so much getting the fibers out of the leaves, there's only *two* in each leaf and ypu have to *scrape* them out with your fingernail/a shell in a weird way (that was not helped by them being too young). But I found a decent method and got them processed!
Iris cord is supposedly super strong, which checks off with this cord!
There's still other stuff going on like putting a bunch of rusty water into a jar with the rest of the iris juice, and seeing if that metal oxide could force precipitation (I'm skeptical because of how strong oxygen bonds are, but I am not a chemist so idk). I did get *something* to precipitate and the iris juice was clearer, but idk if that's actually due to the iron binding to the pigment, or if the precipitate was just the intact rust particles and the pigment vanished some other way.
Oh well, something sure happened though! The precipitate is brown/gray and on a coffee filter right now, which, side note: It's not good for filtering lake pigments because they're fibrous and get mixed into the pigment itself.
Still doing tests with that stuff tho so maybe an extension post later!
Below, in the top right, is the silk+iron+iris. On the left is the light grey that I put *back* into the alum water, which has a slightly cyan tint irl. I wouldn't be surprised if it fades away soon, but still fun to mess around with.
But ye, that concludes some of the fun I've been having with irises recently! My mom wants to get rid of them all but I'm making her keep a patch of them lol. Sadly they're about done blooming but it was fun while it lasted. When the leaves get more mature, hopefully I'll be able to get some better fibers from them!
