Beetroot Adventures

For my birthday, my friend Holly bought me some lovely springform cake tins, one of which is the shape of a heart, so I decided to make a cake. When I came to making icing, I realised I didn't have any food colouring, and since I'd made the simplest, most basic cake on Earth, I really wanted it to be a bit more interesting!

I had a bit of a search through the cupboards and the fridge, and found some beetroot at the back of the fridge. I hate beetroot (for a vegetarian I'm not a massive fan of most vegetables unfortunately), but I had bought it to dye wool with. You may have seen what happened the last time I tried to dye wool with beetroot, but here's a photo:

I've grown to like it, but it wasn't quite what I was after! 

Anyway, back to food colouring. I didn't have any, and I wanted some! So I used the juice from the packet (I didn't want to use too much in case I ended up with beetroot-flavoured icing) to make baby pink icing. Here's the result:

So if you'd like to avoid food colouring for whatever reason, here's the recipe I used/made up:

Ingredients

175g of icing sugar

70g of softened butter

2 tsp vanilla essence

1 tsp lemon juice

A splash of milk

3 tbsp beetroot juice

Basically it's buttercream icing with a couple of extras. I used the vanilla essence and lemon juice to make sure there was no beetroot flavour and it seems to have worked quite nicely. Now I want to try other colours! I bet turmeric would make a crazy bright yellow. Maybe spinach might be worth a try too.

Then, remembering the failed wool dyeing, I decided to try cold-dyeing some wool in beetroot juice. I mushed up 3 beetroots (I bought the pre-cooked ones) and strained out the bits. Then I poured in a random amount of white vinegar (about the same amount of liquid I already had) and put a 100g skein of unmordanted wool in. 

I don't have any pre-mordanted wool at the moment because I haven't got round to it, so that's why I added the white vinegar to the dye instead. I don't know if it made any difference, but after just 2 hours I ran the skein under the tap and no dye came out! Here's the wet wool after I rinsed it. It will probably be a bit lighter once dry, but the colour looks great!

That white patch is kind of infuriating though...

- Kate

Dyes I Have Made With Salt or Vinegar Mordants

I prefer alum as a mordant as it has given me more consistently 'exciting' results. By exciting I mean that the wool has taken the dye well and the colours tend to be deep shades of whichever colour.Salt and vinegar still have their place though, since they can both be bought easily at the supermarket, and there are still nice colours to be had.

Here are some of my results:

I thought that I had done something wrong with this one, but according to various places on the internet, beetroot just doesn't dye wool pink like you would think it does!

The second, brighter colour is wool mordanted with alum. I think with turmeric it doesn't make too much difference which mordant (if any) is used as it stains so easily.

There is a slight tint to this one, but nothing special. When I first dyed it it looked more orangey because the little bits of pepper were stuck to the yarn. I wouldn't have bothered with it at all but my housemates were convinced it would work! 

Here are the salt mordanted dyes:

The salt mordanted skein is actually a rather beautiful grey but I can't seem to capture it in a photograph...

As you can see, these colours are quite dull and similar to each other. I'm sure more exciting results can be achieved but I got my alum delivered and have used that for everything ever since!

-Kate