Several months ago I bought a sample card from Paradise Fibers with a whole bunch of different wool and silk fibers.  I wondered, after Kaleeb’s and my experiments with natural dyes (in which the commercial wool took up the dyes much more intensely than my hand-spun), whether the breed of sheep made a large difference in the color of the finished yarn.  So, I spun up a whole bunch of samples and today I got around to dying them with onion skin.  Here are the results:

The undyed fibers are next to the dyed ones for color reference.    The upshot:  While there were minor differences between the sheep breeds, white wool pretty much all dyed to the same color.  Darker wools were correspondingly darker.  Mohair took up the dye with greater intensity, as did silk.

For those so interested the procedure was:

1. Boil 31 g of onion skins for 15 minutes.

2. Remove the skins and cool the water to bottle warm.

3.  Add all the samples and bring to a boil over medium heat.

4.  Start to finish, the samples were in the dye 30 minutes.