E.T. as I affectionately call it (I grew up with the movie E.T. as a kid :-) really loves to soak in water for as long as possible. It is more like working with bark or roots from natural dyes. The longer you soak it the more color you will extract. It soaked for 5 days before I cooked up the dye bath. You could probably have done a multi day soak again after cooking it up to extract even more color.