Seeing how the dyeing is going,

I decided to check how the dyeing was going.  First I took out the silk that had the frozen mulberries wrapped in it.  This was the batch using previously dyed silk, also using mulberries but fresh ones.  There had been blue spots on a couple of them. They have disappeared.  I did soak the silk in an alum solution and have read that that makes the colour slightly bluer.

As you can see, one of the scarves has come out much bluer than the others.  It may have had more alum in the solution, who knows?
I left this for about 5 days and some of the fruit had started to go mouldy - only a tiny bit but enough to leave a brownish spot on the big scarf, right near the middle.  So more work will have to go into disguising that. There are also some small spots where the seeds have left prints. But the blue spots have vanished!

After that, I thought I might as well check on the bits of silk I had in the old eucalyptus bark dyebath.  The dyebath looked very dark but most of the colour washed out.

The silk had been soaked in alum, the dye and silk crammed into a jar and left 3 days.

This one is extremely 'subtle' and I will probably over-dye it.  I had just folded and pegged it and poured the dye over it and left it for a day.  I may not have left it long enough. 

I think I can stop being frugal and throw out the remaining dyes. I can easily make more, the trees are throwing off scads of bark at the moment. But I may hold my horses as I still have a fair bit of silk from my last burst of interest. I need to think of how to use all this silk, not just have fun dyeing.