Green Walnuts

[Macon Due]

Yup.........my Brother made a wheelbarrow full a couple years ago...LOL
Macon

 

[jethro224]

Coupla questions;

About how much water to how much hulls?

How long to boil?

How long to soak fabric to be dyed?

If I dye a hunting shirt in walnut stain and then get rained on while wearing it will I be dyed?

 

[necchi]

About how much water to how much hulls?

Equal parts by volume works, The green hulls will float till saturated then sink.
The "darkeness" of the stain is adjusted by how much water you boil off. Once the color is in the water it can be concentrated by boiling off the water.

How long to boil?

I just bring things to a rolling boil. I use a 4 gallon stock pot on a coleman stove and run about 3-3 1/2 gallons. Then turn off the heat and let it steep till the next day. The hulls all turn to mush. Then strain the mix through an old t-shirt or pillow case into another bucket an "sqeeze" the strainings to get the most color. Return it to the stock pot re-heat and can it like jelly.

How long to soak fabric to be dyed?

All I do is saturate the fabric, get it wet and thats it. Lay it flat on the grass till dry for a more even color, if you wring it out it's mottled.

If I dye a hunting shirt in walnut stain and then get rained on while wearing it will I be dyed?

Yup, but it only last about a week, :haha:
I'll take the previously dyed fabric and run it through a short wash and spin dry cycle (you'll lose some color), then into the dryer on hot till dry, too eleviate the color bleed through problem. But each washing will fade the color.
tip; pre-wash and shrink the fabric before staining,,

I use the stuff mostly for canvis coverings and leather items like bags and sheath's and treat those items with water seal or snow seal to protect the stain from water bleed issues

 

[Macon Due]

Jethro
When I boiled mine I filled a 3 lb. coffee can about 1/3 full of chopped up walnut hulls and the nuts themselves then filled it up with water. boiled it for about 30min.strained the liquid out,added about 3 more chopped walnut hulls and nuts filled it with water and did the same as the first time.I did that I think 4 times and made about a gallon. I did get a little mold so I added rubbing alcohol [1/2 bottle] to my gal. jug. My brother just had about a 5 gal. bucket of walnuts in the wheelbarrow which got filled with 2-3 gal. of water/snow.......in the Spring he had a couple gal. of stain.
I pre wet the fabric in warm water then just put it in a pail with the stain for about 10-15 min. stirring it around some. Took it out let it drain back into pail. the hung it over a tree limb and rinsed it with the hose. then I ran it thru a wash cycle [while wifey was gone]. One time I just dyed a shirt in her washer,it hurt nothing but ofcourse lost the dye. I bleached out the machine after.

Macon

 

[jethro224]

Thanks for the tips fellers. :hatsoff:

I went out and gathered up a haversack fulla green walnuts this afternoon. Hadta fight the squirrels off 'em. :haha: Got enough to try makin' some dye tho.

I peeled enough of 'em to get about a gallon of hulls. Still have quite a few more... Them things ain't as easy to peel as I seemed to remember they were when I was a kid. :hmm: Might be 'cause I was wearing baggies on my hands in an attempt to not get the brown fingers.
BTW, that didn't work. Maybe I'll just boil the rest of 'em whole.

 

[necchi]

I never husked'm, just throw'm in the pot whole, :idunno:
The shell and nut stay's together, you can dipp out the big chunks with a strainer spoon/ladel before running it through cloth

 

[jethro224]

Well, the missus wanted some for a recipe so I had to husk some of 'em...

Thought I'd do an internet search and see if there was an easier way to husk 'em. There are several.
Roll 'em under your foot on the ground. Takes a while and may not be the best way to get the hull for dye.
A corn husking machine will do it if adjusted right.
Dump 'em in a gravel driveway and run over 'em with your car several times.
Take 'em to a professional.

A couple people said they take truckloads of 'em to buyers who husk 'em before they weigh the nuts and pay you for 'em. They said the buyers will let you fill up a bucket of hulls for free.
Gotta know where a buyer is. :idunno:

This is one of the sites I stumbled upon in my search. Lots of interesting info here. http://home.onemain.com/~crowland/Pages/Walnut.html
Some say to toss in a handful of iron nails, copper, tin, etc. for a mordant and to achieve different colors.
Some said the bark and leaves also make good dye.
Lots of other good tips too. :thumbsup:

 

[paulvallandigham]

Jim: Look up "Mordants" on the web. You can use them to set the color when you have dyed cloth. They work very well. UV light, and bleaches in washing soaps all tend to lighten the colors on any shirt with time, but that is part of the deal. The same thing happened back when, too.

I have a blue shirt I bought when I first started MLing, that is faded from UV light, with the cross made by my suspenders preserving the original dark color. I have friends with shirts they made, using Walnut stain that look much the same as my blue shirt.

I bought the blue shirt because it had the french fer d' lis on it, in yellow/gold? and the shirt fit the character I was portraying- A Free-trapper/hunter from the Illinois country of French descent. I chose Red suspenders to be an indication that I was friendly with the British, too.