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Dyeing with Saffron

2/24/2018

6 Comments

 
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Heads up that this is a completely non-philosophical post! I've been participating in a group of US-based growers who are trialling saffron as a cash crop. The research group is based at the University of Vermont in Burlington, VT, so I attended their first annual conference last year, planted 500 saffron corms on my own land, and just recently completed a series of dye experiments using different parts of the saffron flower. The stigmas, or female parts of the flower are the expensive spice. Stamens and petals are usually waste materials. I heard that another grower was selling stamens to Buddhist monks for dyeing robes, so I thought I'd experiment with my own crop, augmented by donations of stamens and petals from some other growers on our listserve. (It takes A LOT of stamens to get a usable weight of dyestuff to play with!) 

The following content is the report that I wrote up for the rest of the saffron growing community. I'm putting it here as a view into some of the side activities that go on in my studio and also to illustrate the trial and error involved in figuring out how a dye material works. Hopefully my experiments will prove useful to anyone else wanting to dye with saffron and I welcome comments from anyone who has discovered other methods that work with stamens and petals.

Dyeing with all Parts of the Saffron Flower
February 2018
Hannah Regier
Using saffron stamens, petals and stigmas obtained from many growers from the saffronnet listserve, I did a series of dye tests on wool/alpaca yarn. Four different mordant treatments were used and several different concentrations of dried flower parts to weight of fiber (WOF) were tried.

Basic Process
  1. Combining samples of each flower part and blending together. Some of the stamens and petals appeared to have faded during storage -- I didn’t use the faded samples for these tests.
  2. Weighing out amounts for each dye bath. See the chart on the next page for exact proportions of each flower part tested.
  3. Bringing the flower parts to a simmer in water and steeping for 1 hour before letting to cool and straining. I used well water with a pH of 6-7 and did not alter the pH on any of the dye tests.
  4. Measuring dye liquid into jars and putting 2 gram skeins of yarn with different mordants into each jar. (Standard mordanting process can be found in any natural dye resource.)
  5. In a large canning pot, bringing the dye solutions with yarn back up to ~180º and steeping there for an hour, before letting to cool.
  6. Rinsing in plain water and washing in mild detergent. Drying.
  7. Not finished yet: testing for light fastness by exposing a section of each skein to direct sunlight for several weeks.
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Comparing faded and unfaded saffron stamens
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Non-faded saffron petals
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Weighing stamens for dye
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Yarn in dye made from stigmas
​Testing grid
The following grid shows all of the dye tests that I ran with the different parts of the flower, using 4 different mordants. The “% WOF” refers to the weights of plant material I used in proportion to the Weight Of Fiber. All of the tests were done on 2 gram skeins of yarn so 100% WOF would mean I used 2 grams of dyestuff for that test. The codes in each cell are what I wrote on the label of each skein so I could keep track of which dye jar they came from.
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Results
Stigmas have by far the strongest dye potential. The dye made from 12% stigmas per WOF was incredibly bright, compared to the darkest shades made from 100% stamens per WOF and 200% petals per WOF.
Despite my research and finding information that refers to saffron as a substantive dye (i.e. not requiring a mordant), dye uptake was consistently better with Alum and Iron as mordants. I am assuming light and wash fastness will also be better on the mordanted samples.
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Testing for light fastness by exposing part of each sample skein to direct sunlight for a week or more.
Petal Samples:
The top skein in each section is mordanted but undyed yarn for comparison. Note that the pink color on the rhubarb leaf mordanted yarn comes mostly from the rhubarb leaves themselves, not the saffron.
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Stamen Samples:
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Stigma samples:
​Note that the 2nd and 3rd samples in each section are from reintroducing new yarn into the used dye baths, called “exhaust dye baths.” The persistent color results, show that the dye is strong enough to be used several times and/or at even lower concentrations.
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Conclusions
Given the cost of saffron stigmas, it may be hard to justify using them as a dye material, but I will probably continue to explore it with what I grow myself. The colors obtained from the stamens and petals are nice, but can be achieved with much smaller quantities of other locally found natural dye materials, so using those parts of the saffron flower is probably not worth it, barring any breakthroughs in ways to get darker/brighter tones.
​
Many thanks to the growers who sent me their stamens and petals for this experiment:
North American Center for Saffron Research and Development at UVM, Jack Kennedy, Erin Stebbins, Joseph Walls, Sarah Salatino of Full Circle Gardens, Michelle Wells, and Miriam Haas.
6 Comments
Miriam Haas
10/27/2018 09:24:16 am

Hannah
I was very impressed with your research and pictures. Your article was forwarded by another person who wanted some dye material. And you are the person who I sent my pollen to last year. I love the enthusiasm of the saffron growers. I hope your second year crop was as good as mine. My year one was 64 flowers and this year up to 400 and some more to come. We had so much rain I was afraid the corms would rot but they did not
Miriam Haas

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Hannah
10/28/2018 01:15:41 pm

Hi Miriam, nice to hear from you. Glad my research is getting some readers! My saffron is verrrrrrrry slow to bloom this year. I can hardly blame it with several hard frosts already here and some snow-ish stuff on it now.. hopefully the temps will rise enough for it to recover!

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Lucinda Rubio-Barrick
7/19/2020 01:55:59 pm

Thank you for this information on saffron. I am lucky to get a small box of saffron threads from Spain every year. I have more than I can use in food. A couple of years ago I tried dying a small silk scarf just with water where I had seeped threads. The result was a beautiful pale orange color. I would like to try with alum.

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Geoff Slater link
7/27/2020 11:46:03 pm

Hi Hannah
We are saffron growers in Canterbury New Zealand. I was very impressed with your article on saffron dyeing. We have tried dyeing wool with our saffron stigmas with good results.After reading your article we are going to try dyeing with all the parts of our saffron this coming season. We should have about 150,000 flowers to pick this coming year.
Regards Geoff

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Janelle link
12/17/2020 09:29:47 pm

Loved reading this, thank you

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Mary Ann Kell
12/17/2022 02:39:45 am

Hi Hannah,
Loved your article, research, and pictures!
I belong to the Ozark Heritage Garden Club in the Missouri Ozarks, and was just writing a "Focus" on the Saffron Crocus and it's culinary uses for our Newsletter, when I thought about dye potential (I'm also in the Knitting Club).
WOW! I figured the stigmas would produce a yellowy color, but wasn't expecting one so bright. And I would not have thought that any color would come from the petals.
I'll be linking your article to our Newsletter. You deserve the recognition.
Thank you for your work.

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