Ethnobotanical Pursuits: A Lesson Learned.......Maybe

  Sometimes things don't turn out the way you expect them too.
I have a bunch of Black Walnut dye thats been sitting in my garage for about a year now. Last year at Black Walnut harvest time, I filled a bucket with a bunch of already brown walnut husks, than I filled the bucket with water just enough to cover the husks. After a few weeks I strained the thick brown liquid through a strainer and bottled the liquid with the intention of doing some natural tie dye. I had over two gallons. I left one in its natural state and after reading on the internet that you can make the dye much darker by adding iron nails to the liquid, I added a bunch of iron nails to the second gallon as an experiment. The shirts came out better than I ever imagined and since the dye is light and colorfast, even without a mordant, the shirts still look good to this day after many washings. I also used the dye to stain a vase I made out of Ash, a light colored wood, and it came out as good as, if not better than, a walnut stain you can by in the store. I also dyed an some raw hide for lacing and drum making and they came out great. Anyway, after playing around with the dye, I decide to keep what was left for future use.
  The weather was exceptionally warm yesterday and conducive to playing with water outside again so I decided to drag out the dye and do some tie dye again. Everything looked normal and the one that had the nails in it (for a year now) was pitch black! I was excited to see the results.I did the usual tie dye thing and the shirts came out of the dyes looking incredible, super dark and even and I couldn't wait to get the rubber bands off to see the design. I rinsed the shirts in clear water as I have always done as not to have the dye bleed into the design. 99.9% of the dye came out! I couldn't believe it didn't work! I did everything the same as I always have done but all the dye washed out and left the shirts just looking really dirty and not at all dyed. I couldn't figure out what went wrong.
I rinsed the shirts off the best I could and decided to try using Alum as a mordant to see if this would help. Well, after cooking the shirts in Alum I tried the process over again, minus the tyeing . I even decided to let The shirts sit in the dye over night.I started to try to figure what the problem was and narrowed it down (in my mind) to two choices. One, since the shirts were a different manufacturer, I thought the shirts might be treated with something that was not on the label. Two, some unknown process was at work in the dye, over all this time, that rendered it not colorfast somehow. As a control, I decided to dye another shirt with Turmeric to see if it was the shirt was the problem.
  Well, today I took the shirts out of the dye and rinsed them in cool clear water and all the dye came out again! The shirt I did with Turmeric came out beautifully, so I guess it isn't the shirts. Just to continue the testing, I stained a piece of pine with both Walnut stains to see what would happen and the both worked OK, not as well as they did last year, but still usable.
  So what is the lesson here? I'm not really sure, as I still don't know the real reason it didn't work. I will have to wait till Walnut harvest season again next year to make a final conclusion, till than, I will experiment some more with staining wood with the dye. As a side note, I also had saved some Poke berry Dye from last year and instead of being purple it is now an orange yellow! (see photo)
Peace