Avocados are probably my favourite food ever, so it hasn’t been too much of a hardship to eat lots of avocados over the past few weeks! I saved the skins (and also the stones for future use) and stored them in the freezer.
The fabric was mordanted in soya milk, left to cure for over a month. The avocado skins were soaked and heated in water and after 24 hours, the mush was squeezed through a muslin cloth to reveal a beautifully deep red dye.
I used a 1:1 ratio of avocado skins to weight of fabric, but I could see that there was still a lot of dyeing potential in the dye bath so I dyed two more scarves afterwards.
The fabrics left to right are bamboo silk, organic cotton and hemp/cotton jersey. I also dyed another cotton scarf that’s not pictured. The markings are all created through various methods of tying and clipping to form resists.
The fabric swatch on the top left was modified in iron water which produced a beautiful deep mauve colour.
I am currently carrying out lightfastness tests on the aldercone and avocado skin dye. The swatch at the bottom on the right is madder mordanted with aluminium acetate as a control.
