Red Onion Skin Dye Colours Modified with Alkali

"The onion skin bag turned out alright, didn't it Beaut? No need for all that doom and gloom." 
I drank my tea and admired its colours, all warm and autumnal in the Spring sunshine.
"Oh, I always thought I'd get there in the end." 
My companion lit her cigarette and blew smoke rings into the green air.

"You didn't look too confident to me. Only a couple of days ago, I recall you sobbing and moaning and threatening to fall upon your own knitting needles."
"Well, it was a struggle. I'm not sure I'd try this method again."
In the absence of a long colour change yarn, I had decided to knit entrelac using a load of 25g skeins I'd dyed with brown onion skins and red onion skins. My intention was to work each square to give the appearance of one colour weaving under and over the next. Which meant an awful lot of ends to sew in.

Instead of casting on for the entrelac, where I've found it hard to make the initial edge sufficiently loose, my other great idea was to knit a strip of cable to become the gusset and the handle. Then I began by picking up stitches for the entrelac from one side . First problem was over-enthusiastically making too many starting triangles and having to unpick the edges of the top ones back off the gusset.

Second problem was the lumpiness of joining entrelac cast off triangles along the bottom edge, which I did by picking up a stitch from the gusset at the end of alternate rows and purling three together, instead of two. Third problem was making the joins of each triangle along the opposite side equal in length to the cast on triangles - it should have been straightforward, picking up one stitch from every other row of the gusset, only somehow, it wasn't, and had to be frogged and reknitted, repeatedly holding the two sides together to check they were equal.

Knitting the front of the bag, it was easier to copy the spacing. I planned an i-cord edging to finish the entrelac panels and for once in my life, I did knit and edge a swatch, which was intended to become an inside pocket. In the wash, the i-cord shrunk more than entrelac, so I learnt to pick up nine stitches across each of my eight stitch triangles and add three stitches for going round corners.

A more unexpected lesson of felting the swatch was finding out how significantly the colours of the red onion dyes would shift when washed with colour washing powder. I know washing powder is alkaline, but when felting, I prefer to use it even with plant dyes because I believe the roughening caused by alkali helps wool fibres felt better than simple hot water and friction. However, I didn't anticipate much colour change. Previous experimentation with soaking brown onion dyed fibres in alkali solution hadn't modified the colours perceptibly. As you can see from the photo above, unlike the brown, the dyes from red onion skins did all shift toward yellow once the bag was exposed to alkaline washing powder.  Most obviously, the green wool, used for the i-cord edging, which had been alum mordanted before dyeing, had turned a rich orange yellow and the unmordanted, deep chocolate yarns had become more red. The various shades of ginger yarn, which had been dyed with brown onion skins, did not change nearly so much. Two kinds of onion, two kinds of dye.

"Mmm, I love the bag lining. Feels like suede."
"It's a remnant of that fabric Mum used to upholster my armchair. There's still some left. I might try another experiment with entrelac, see if I can knit a bag in a ball shape. Like that time when I accidentally joined the wrong edges of the squares together and the fabric curved round."
My companion explored the handbag, emerging from the inside pocket like a young marsupial.
"Like childbirth really, isn't it?" 
Thinking of kangaroos and joeys, I failed to make the right connection.
"How?"
 Elinor waved a hoof. 
"Making up knitted bag patterns, Beaut. You forget all the pain soon as you have it on your arm."