All around where I live Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare) grows like a weed and is in full bloom at the moment. The cheery yellow buttons that are its flowers can easily be spotted from quite a distance away.

Tansy has a rather interesting history as an herb and its uses date back for centuries. At one point in time it was used medicinally as a bitter herb and a way of ridding the body of parasites. These practices are no longer used as the herb in recent times has been found to be too potent for consumption.

In the Middle Ages, Tansy was quite popular as a strewing herb. It was dried and sprinkled about as it was believed to repel pests such as ants and flies. In many a home, one would find bouquets of Tansy hanging to dry. The leaves were also rubbed on meat in attempts to preserve it longer.

In the modern day herb garden Tansy is a welcome- if not somewhat invasive- pretty flower to grow with lacey, fern-like foliage. In bloom, Tansy attracts beneficial insects like no other plant seems to be able to. The flat and tiny blooms appear to be irresistible to our garden allies.

Today Tansy is mostly used for its ornamental purposes both in and out of the garden. Dried, the flowers are excellent in arrangements. One could also place the dried leaves in sachets to be used as an insect repellent. If it grows a bit out of hand, as it does spread by underground rhizomes, it can be pulled and added to the compost head for its potassium content.

My main interest in Tansy is for a completely different reason than the ones stated above. I grow it not only for its historicalness but also for the fact that it makes an excellent dye for wool. I have used Tansy in my dye baths multiply times and have yet to be disappointed. I have been able to yield gorgeous shades of green and yellow from this one simple herb. I recently gathered a large amount for dyeing and was able to produce the results shown in the photos below.

I love herbs that have history behind them and Tansy is no exception. To some, it might be considered too weed-like for their garden but to me it is one herb I would never leave out. After all, if it gets too out of hand I just toss it in the dye pot!

*EDITED:   There appears to be some confusion over the Tansy I am referring to in this post. Please do not mistake the Common Tansy I write about, Tanacetum vulgare, for the dangerous and harmful Tansy Ragwort or Senecio jacobaea.  Below I have supplied a few links to help clear up some of this confusion.

• Why you should definitely avoid Tansy Ragwort if you have horses and why Common Tansy should also be kept from them.
• Information on Tansy Ragwort
• More useful information on Tansy Ragwort
• Oregon Department of Agriculture’s info on Tansy Ragwort
• Google image search for Tansy Ragwort for identification help
• Google image search for Common Tansy for identification help

This year I grew onions in the garden and there are all but two left that I finally pulled up just this week. We managed to eat up all the rest rather quickly. They were so good on tomato sandwiches! I now know that for this house, I need to grow lots more onions next year.

 We do cook with onions a lot in my house. They are such a versatile ingredient that adds so much to one’s cooking. Leave out onions and you are leaving out a lot of flavor. As tasty as they can be I have yet another reason for loving this simple crop.

Briefly on this blog I have mentioned my love affair with knitting but I have failed to mention yet another passion of fiber I have. This passion happens to combine my love of gardening with my love of knitting very well making it a power packed craft for me. What is this craft? Well, for a few years now I have been using herbs and other various plants from my garden to dye my yarn that I use in my knitting. It has been an incredibly addicting thing for me to do. All I want to do now is fill my garden up with plants that I can dye with.

That brings me back to the humble little onion. Not only is this one handy veggie crop to grow for eating BUT it can also be used for dyeing. The skins from yellow onions make an amazing dye and the colors you achieve from them are very beautiful. The picture below shows yarn that I dyed with onion skins just recently.

Every time I pull out these skeins of yarn I am amazed that I can achieve this range of color just by using simple onion skins. So, the next time an onion starts to bring tears to your eyes as you cut it up keep in mind just how useful they really are!

For those that may be interested in how I go about dyeing yarn you can visit my other blog to read more (the blog that sadly never gets updated anymore). Here I posted more detailed instructions for using onion skins as a dye.

I also played around with the ph of this dye. To begin I started with a whole head of red cabbage which I chopped up and placed in my dye pot. To this I added rainwater to cover it. I brought this “cabbage soup” slowly to simmer. I tried to keep the temperature under 200° F for an hour. I then allowed it to cool for one hour before I strained it. After straining it, I divided the dye in half. To one half, I mixed in some vinegar to make the bath more acidic. It was pretty cool because the dye immediately changed from being an eggplant purple to a cranberry red. Chemistry can be fun!

This picture shows the color change. The cup on the left shows the before vinegar and the cup on the right is after vinegar was added.

To the cranberry red dye I added a skein of yarn that I had mordanted with alum. I brought it once again to a simmer and kept it around 190° F for one hour. I then left it to cool over night.

For the second half of the red cabbage dye, I dissolved some baking soda in warm water and added it to the dye. Now instead of being acidic this dye bath was more alkaline. The baking soda turned the dye an almost turquoise like blue-green. I followed the same procedure with this dye as I did with the previous one: I used superwash yarn that I had mordanted with alum and brought it slowly to a simmer. The only difference was I simmered it for 45 minutes instead of one hour. I wish I simmered it even less then that though because I actually liked the color better after it had been in simmering for about 30 minutes instead of the color it achieved after 45 minutes.

One funny side note about this dye: my house smelt like sauerkraut for quite a while after adding the vinegar to the first dye bath! Not too bad if you like that smell….but it was starting to make me feel a little sick!

So, the final results after being rinsed, dried, and re-skeined? The first skein, the one with the vinegar, turned a really pretty, pale lilac color. The baking soda skein ended up a soft sage green color.

They are both such soft colors and look really nice together. I am very curious to see what happens to them after several washings.

I am hoping to be able to cast on some socks out of them this weekend. So, be on the look out for future updates on these two yarns!