Marigold dye

We decided to give the marigold dye a go as you can see! (By we I mean the kids and I as they are home from school for the holidays. )I picked 20 or so big marigold flowers and the kids pulled them apart. We put the green bits to the side as we wanted to make orange dye not brown:)
I pour about 750 mls of boiling water over the petals (enough to cover the mix but hopefully not over dilute the mix!) and my daugther gives it all a stir. I took some samples of the water at 5mins to see what the colour was like and then again after 1.5hours. To my suprise there was no difference. The marigolds smell was all over our hands but the smell of the water was not very 'marigoldy' at all. I was suprised at that too.

The petals soaked for about 3.5 hours for no other reason than I didn't want to heat up the element just to boil the petals. I waited till I already had the element hot and then gave them an hour. The resulting pulp was less than 1/2 a cup and the resulting dye was a dirty orange.

I figured it would settle though so left it over night to do just that.

In the morning the mix had settled but some of the particles had suspended themselves in a sort of cloudy gel in the mix.(Which you can see below) I'm not sure what caused this but I would need to strain the dye through a cheese-cloth to get rid of the remaining sediment.

I have taken some samples of the mix to test the strength and it's 2x as strong as it was prior to being boiled although a definate yellow with a green base and not an orange. I will be having a play around painting with the dye tomorrow so hopefully I will get some nice results!