To dye or not to dye

These poor socks have seen better days. So why not over dye them and give them a new look. That’s a wonderful idea I said to my self so off to the dye pot I go.
After cooking them for a couple of hours in an alkaline solution to scour them, in to the mordant bath they go. I’m trying to achieve a black so an Iron mordant should do the job. But wait there not at all rust color but purple. Now what did I do wrong, well we’ll just let it simmer for an hour and continue any way.

Time to rinse out the socks and dye them, into the dye bath they go. Wow did that turn black real fast, I’ll let them sit for a while and check them in a bit.

Oh no just a light grey, not at all what I’m after. Let’s raise the Ph of the dye bath that may do the trick. O heaven for bid now it’s a red brown not at all what I wanted so well leave it in and check back later.

When I originally dyed these socks I dyed them with roses. I had done some experimentation and roses with iron on cotton came out black. Roses must have a lot of tannin. That isn’t what really happened; they came out more of a dark brown. Not a bad color for socks I was just trying for the black thing.

So this time I decided to use pomegranate rinds, I herd that with iron you get a black so I thought I would give that a try. To my dismay that is not what you get with pomegranate rinds on cotton with a high Ph, at least not wqhen I do it.

Ok let’s take them out of the dye bath and oxidize for a while then we'll rinse them. Well they came out dark after the oxidization but lightened up when they were rinsed. So here they are in the drying stage, they are better looking then when I started. But there just not the black I was looking for I guess I will have to try again another time.