How to turn plants like lavender, nettles, goldenrod, and elderberries into natural dyes for fabrics like cotton, linen plus wool and silk. Use this starter guide to begin creating botanical dyes from your garden.
Woad was used for thousands of years to produce blue dyes. It was replaced by synthetic dyes in the 20th century. It is easy to grow but can become invasive
This article contains an overview of natural green dyes that can be used to dye both yarn and fabric. The first color that comes to mind when
Jason Logan's new book is a how-to guide on natural ink making
Obtenir des nuances de bleu clair et violet par extraction à froid de la teinture aux haricots noirs.
I am not a fan of dyeing with berries! Generally the colours aren’t fast and if we’re talking edible berries, I would much rather eat them. Sumac trees are a new discovery in my dye pot…
Steeped in history and romance pomegranates have long been cultivated for their nutritious and delicious juice. The flowers are bright red and so beautiful that some fruitless varieties are grown for ornamental value. I've witnessed the fruit just dropping to the ground, providing food for animals - which is crazy to me because they're packed with useful properties beyond food, they're also a tannin rich dye.
Natural Dyeing Tutorial. Learn how to use red cabbage to obtain beautiful purples, greens and blues with organic cotton yarn.
The UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley, CA hosted Michel Garcia, chemist and natural dyer from France, to host a two-day workshop exploring natural mordants and dyes. Michel has done tremendous work in this area to explore plants and tannins as a sustainable method for natural dyeing rather than relyin
My woad plant (Isatis Tinctoria) suffered quite an extensive catepillar attack while I was away this summer. I thought it best to dye with it as soon as possible before it got all eaten away. This …
4 Natural Dyes you can use without the need of a mordant.
This guide on natural dyeing, covers all you need to know about what natural dyeing is and how to make natural dye. It covers what supplies you will need and the general process for how to make natural dye from food and foraged items.
If you enjoy knitting, embroidery, or sewing, then natural dyeing using plants will add another element to your creations.
Steeped in history and romance pomegranates have long been cultivated for their nutritious and delicious juice. The flowers are bright red and so beautiful that some fruitless varieties are grown for ornamental value. I've witnessed the fruit just dropping to the ground, providing food for animals - which is crazy to me because they're packed with useful properties beyond food, they're also a tannin rich dye.
Woad was used for thousands of years to produce blue dyes. It was replaced by synthetic dyes in the 20th century. It is easy to grow but can become invasive
I’m so excited to share with you my 2nd natural dyeing tutorial. This is definitely one of my favorites because there is no heat required for setting the dye. It’s basically a set it an…
With this guide you will learn how to make a beautiful range of pinks, apricot, blush and even grey dyes using avocado pits and skins.
One of my favourite plants to dye with in the spring is the stinging nettle – it’s one of the plants I most look forward to. The leaves give me a soft grey-green hue at this time of year (maybe you get a slightly different colour?) – the colour just feels so fresh and “alive”...
Common Buckthorn (rhamnus cathartica), also known as European Buckthorn, is a virulent invasive plant species that has taken over many of the natural areas that are adjacent to my Southern Ontario …
Learn why mud dyes might be the perfect starting point for anyone wanting to start natural dyeing. They're safe, easy to use, and come in a variety of beautiful colors.
I promised I’d show you some more of my experiments with natural dyeing. Let me first show you the result and then I’ll tell you how I did it. Close to my home there are plenty of horse…
It’s time to collect black walnuts! The black walnut tree (Juglans nigra) is native to eastern North America. The outer husk of the nut is the source of dye. The colorant is juglone. It is a dir…
Have you ever tried extracting colors from plants? There are hundreds of plants bearing beautiful dyes, growing all around us. Yes, some plants are traditionally recognized as basic dye sources, but if you open your eyes and look around, you will find an abundance of color in front of your door. I made a list of plants local to me, but I strongly encourage you to try plants that grow around where you live. And living in a city is no excuse here! I live in a big city myself - but even in Berlin, Germany I found enough plants to make a full spectrum of color.
This summer I’ve made dyes from a few flowers from my garden. In this blog post, I’ll share my dye notes and colour swatches for three colours of buddleja (butterfly bush), yarrow and goldenrod flowers. I used cellulose fabric for all of the swatches — organic cotton, bamboo viscose and linen. Aluminium dye pots were...
I recently dyed yarn with avocados for the first time and I can’t believe I waited so long to try this out! I shared the entire experience and step-by-step tutorial on Instagram here and it continues with rounds 3 and 4 here! I absolutely fell in love with this process. It’s simple, easy, and so...
Si quieres lucir un trasero de impacto, prueba con estos alimentos que te ayudarán a que tus glúteos crezcan en tiempo récord
. . . und das sind die Ergebnisse des 5.,6.,7. und 8. Farbzugs. Gefärbt habe ich insgesamt 800 g Wolle mit 430 g Holunderbeeren. Gebeizt hab...
After the weekend I spent recently in the UK doing plant dyeing with friends there, I came home with a fistful of pH strip packages and a lot of curiosity about what my dye baths would do if I made…
In this blog post I’ll share with you the range of shades I made with red onion skins. Such a simple dye plant yields a wide range of colours. It never fails to amaze me! The methods I use are from my book Botanical Colour at your Fingertips, which is available as a paperback and...
Low Impact Dyeing as a new way to create impressive green blues.
Want to make pink dye & naturally dye with avocado pits, our natural dye tutorial will show you how to make pink dye & dye with avocado
Tutorial 3 ECO PRINTING BASICS Note that these are my current practices. In your own research and experiments, you may well discover other processes that work well for you. Take what you can respon…
Though I know silver birch bark contains enough colour to dye an equal weight of fibre, I prefer to start with twice as much bark, so as to be sure of a deep pink result. After peeling 600g bark off a fallen birch branch, I planned to dye 300g yarn. The peelings were left to ferment for a week in a bucket of water, then simmered for an hour or so and left overnight. The process of fermentation had reduced the pH of the dye bath to a fairly acidic pH 5, so I added enough dissolved soda ash to bring it up to neutral pH 7 before simmering my scoured yarn for an hour. After soaking overnight, the yarn came out a nice deep pink and the dye bath was still so dark I could barely see the peeled bark floating around at the bottom of the pot. Retesting with indicator paper later that day, it seemed that the bark must still be fermenting despite having been simmered, as the pH had dropped again. Over the next five days, I kept adding a little more soda ash to keep the pH neutral and dyeing successive batches of scoured yarn by simmering for an hour and leaving them in the pot for an overnight soak. By the time the dye bath was giving only palest pink, the original 600g bark had dyed 1.4 kg of fibres - some of them shown in the photo above. The fluid still looked dark. Nonetheless, I feel clear the dye bath is exhausted - or possibly, vice versa.
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