I'm wondering if there is a short circuit in my brain that makes precision impossible. No matter how I struggle, my sewing is never straight, and no matter how careful I am about measuring and labeling my dye trials always dissolve into a mess. To find the best neutral background for the chuppah cover I am making for my son's wedding, I carefully set aside a half yard of the linen I am using and processed it just exactly like the main piece, then cut it into smaller chunks. I silkscreened the trial pieces with leaf shapes using a selection of thickened tannin-based dyes, to wit: tannin (made from oak galls), myrobalan, a tannin/myrobalan mix, quebracho yellow, pomegranate, walnut and walnut/tannin. Finally I introduced various browny/beigey dyes over the top, first by painting and then by immersion. Argh! Everything turned out peachy, yellowy, and/or way too dark. I took all of the lighter colors and immersed part of them into an iron post bath to see what happened. Grays happened. Nice grays, but not what I had in mind.
The biggest surprise was walnut. The only other walnut dyeing I have done is with actual black walnuts taken from the most impressive and gorgeous tree out on Fir Island, the delta of the Skagit River. At the turn of the twentieth century a lot of farmers settled on this flat, hyper-fertile triangle and planted various shade, fruit and nut trees that they brought from their homes in the east. Now some of those trees rooted in river sediment ten feet deep (with no rocks!) and watered without stint have grown into giants of their kind, and the black walnut is the king...truly magnificent in size and graceful in shape. When I was teaching natural dyeing to the local weaving guild, the class hostess was the neighbor of the walnut tree owner and arranged for us to have as many of its just dropped walnut pods as we could carry away. We dyed a selection of yarns and I did one length of linen in the walnut liquor we extracted from those pods. All, without variation, dyed a grayish brown reminiscent of monks' robes. My access to the King of Walnuts disappeared when my friend moved away, but I assumed that the extract I got from earthues would give the same color. As it turns out, it does, but only in the stronger values. The lighter I tried to make it, the more red it appeared. In the photo, the three pieces on the bottom right are all walnut. Even as a tint the color is lively, but reddish, and still too dark in the sample above. I added some logwood gray to the one on the far right and got a color so hideous I had to avert my eyes, but as it aged it got softer, grayer and more like the walnut color I was expecting. Now I have used up all of my practice fabric and I still don't know for sure what to do. All this work and I will still be dyeing by the seat of my pants.