Some plant dye duds

Some recent unsuccessful plant dyes...so you don't have to waste your time, too :)

Yellow beets: We got yellow beet roots (Beta vulgaris) in our CSA veggie box and after cooking them one night, I wondered if the leftover juice would dye anything. I used alum and 100% cotton and got basically nothing.

Buddleja "Butterfly Bush": Jenny Dean (a plant dye guru) posted here on her blog that she got bright yellow-golds to greens from Buddleja flowers. There are a few bushes on UW campus and in my neighborhood, so of course I tried it. I used alum and 100% cotton. Although the dyebath was dark colored, nothing really happened on the cotton. Just today, I re-read Jenny's post and am wondering if I had not properly extracted the color. I can easily get more material, so I may try this again following her steeping directions and using wool instead of cotton "just in case".
I'll keep you posted, but until then, Buddleja is a dye dud in my book :)