Natural Plant Dyes - yellow onion skins & dahlia flowers create this gorgeous whirligig shrug

This weekend we have a workshop coming up on natural plant dyes!  More on this wonderful topic after Saturday, but related, here are some photos of a gorgeous hand-dyed "whirligig shrug" our friend Juanita recently created for our 2 year old.  Juanita is an amazing knitter who has been experimenting with all manner of natural dyes.  She dyed the yarn for this little shrug with yellow onion skins and dahlia flowers, left steeping in the dye bath to varying lengths of time to create darker and lighter shades of gold.  The shrug is SO sweet, and our little one loves wearing it - it's light enough for breezy summer days.

In case you want the pattern, it's from the magazine "Interweave Knits, Weekend 2009" and called "Whirligig Shrug" by Stefanie Japel. For Ravelry members, a direct link to the pattern is found here: http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/whirligig-shrug and her completed project is found here: http://www.ravelry.com/projects/baumzger/whirligig-shrug.
Here's a photo of Juanita's hand dyeing results, posted on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/baumzger/4086033185/in/set-72157614020432972