Avocados - Natural Dye Experiments

Ramblings and recipes under break
I love the idea of using food waste, something that usually has no use other than compost, for dyeing. That's why despite these not really being my colors I played around a bit with avocados. Note: I dyed in small batches only using the skins and pits of three avocados total. It is possible to get much more saturated colors than this by using more avocados. The skins and pits can be frozen until you are ready to make a dye batch.

I tested out both a hot and cold dye process for avocados, and though both work personally I think the hot kettle dyeing process is the way to go.

Avocados in ammonia a week later, with wool

For the cold dye I placed the skin and pit of 1 avocado in a small jar, chopping up the pit and loosely ripping the skin. I then filled the jar with 1 part ammonia to 3 parts water and left it for a week. The liquid turned a a dark scarlet color and I had high hopes for a vibrant color. After a week, I strained out the avocado bits and submerged some wool (not mordanted) in it overnight. In the morning most of the color rinsed out, leaving a dull peachy color behind. A few days later I did the same with pre-mordanted wool, which had basically the same results. It is worth noting that in both cases the color developed a bit while drying, becoming slightly more vibrant than it appeared to be when first rinsed
out.

Kind of looks like fall in there

 For the hot dye, I put the skins and chopped up pits of 2 avocados and some water in a dye pot and simmered it for an hour. The water turned reddish orange and smelled weirdly fruity the entire time. At the end of the hour I strained out the avocado pieces and placed my wool in the pot. It had been mordanted recently and was still slightly warm - I would not recommend putting cool wool directly into simmering liquid because it could result in felting. I left it there for 10 minutes, then turned off the heat and allowed it to cool to room temperature. Rinsed out it was a lovely light salmon color.

Results so far:
1) Copper sulfate after bath on cold dyed wool - the copper sulfate I use is made from ammonia, which burns most colors to the yellow brown above. I hoped it would have a more positive effect when paired with an ammonia based dye (like the rock tripe) but no such luck this time

2) Cold dyed with mordant (alum and cream of tartar) - more orange than mordanted wool, an apricot color

3) Cold dyed with no mordant - peach color

4) Kettle Dyed with mordant (alum and cream of tartar) - it's not quite as orange as the picture above, I was having trouble getting the pinks of the cold dyes right and never thought to take a separate picture for the orange

I might do this again in the future with more avocados, will update if it happens.