Walnut Husk Experiment #1 March-May 2020
The week before everything changed, I was in kentucky with family. I took walks in the big park by my Dad’s house and collected fallen (and decomposing) walnut husks. I brought about 5 lbs back to the studio for dye experimenting. From research I gathered i needed to soak the husks in water for quite some time before they would release their dye so i started with 1200 g of husks (about 1/2 of them still had the shells inside them) and I included a piece of cotton in the soak. I started with boiling water, poured it over the husks, cooling and sitting in ‘garage temp’. The 4 samples on the left in the picture are from each week in the month long experiment. Once a week the first month i took a cut from the cotton, washed it and hung dry.
After 1 month, I strained the husks into a new bucket, added more water, and started a second soak to see if there would still be extractable dye. I boiled for 1 hour the strained 1-month-old dye bath with the cotton scrap that had been soaking for the duration and a second cloth of fresh raw scoured cotton. I let the bath cool overnight and took out the cotton test scraps the next day, washing and rinsing. These are the two samples on the far right. The lavender tinted sample is the fresh cotton with 1 hour boil, overnight soak, the darker is the month soaked fabric. Since this I cut larger pieces of scoured cotton to soak for 1 month in the first batch of strained dye bath, and i have the 2nd bucket with husks soaking in new water with additional cotton. In another 3 weeks and we will have more walnut testing complete! < Leah at RTG
