Using Garden Plants for Dyeing

I have a new hobby! After taking a workshop earlier this spring on using Natural Dyes, I became hooked. Instead of trimming my plants and putting the clippings right into the compost pile, some of them can be used to make dyes. I thought I'd share the process with you.

These are blooms from a bouquet of roses my husband gave me for my birthday.







I separated the flower petals, added some leaves, and put them into a pot of water.

 

I let them boil down until they looked like this:

 

Big color change! I let the goop sit overnight, then brought it up to a simmer again, and let the pot sit again for a few hours to be sure I extracted all the color.

 

This is what I got:

A lovely brownish dye! Have no idea how it's going to perform on the prepared cotton that I have waiting.....

Then, it was time to clip my 'Golden Goddess' Bamboo.....

 

Same process.... let simmer, then sit overnight, simmer again, let sit again, and as you can see, the color of the leaves didn't change at all, but I got a dye that looks kind of like pee after a lot of beer hahaha.

 

Next, I had to prepare the fabric. I had some various kinds of white cotton which got scoured (basically simmered in soapy water for a couple of hours), then soaked in a tannin solution (which I made from powdered Lemonade Berry - Rhus integrifolia - leaves growing in my yard), then soaked in an alum solution.

 

Here are the fabric samples in various wrapped and tied bundles, soaking up the dye. I also decided to use some osage orange, which is a flower (I didn't grow it, but bought the powder), and I love the yellow/orange color it gives.

The bamboo pot is in the back, the rose front left, and osage orange is front right. What is not pictured is a bowl of old red wine (I waste nothing!) with some cotton soaking away in it.

The bamboo didn't really color the fabric at all, so I added some "iron liquor" to darken it up. I made this solution using half water and half vinegar in a jar, to which I added a bunch of rusty nails, and some metal lobster/nut crackers. The vinegar causes the rust to form, and I can add the solution to a dye to darken it up. The rose dye was darker in the glass than on the fabric, but it made it a nice light tan.

Here are the final fabric swatches:

 

on the left, bamboo/iron after-dye; top middle-osage and bamboo/iron; top right - wine tie-dye; lower left - osage and wine; bottom right - dip-dyed osage and rose

And, here they are drying on a rack. They will fade a bit once they dry, but they look really great!

I use different folding, scrunching, dip-dying, or tie-dyeing techniques on the fabrics to give them some variety. Not sure what I'll make with all this, but here's a sample of something I'm working on right now:

This is a white cotton dishtowel I had, dyed it with madder root and osage orange, and I'm fashioning it into a small purse. Here, I'm finishing the top edge with some hemp in a blanket stitch. I'll show off the finished product very soon!

Now I've got to go clean up the kitchen and all my messy pots!


Building a Bee House

Mason Bees (Osmia) are smaller than honeybees, and great pollinators in your garden. They do not sting. They build nests inside hollow tubes, where the female lays one egg, then mixes nectar and pollen with wood shavings and deposits it into the tube. Then, she lays another egg, and repeats the process. She lays female-destined eggs in the back of the nest, and male eggs towards the front. She caps off the end of each tube with a kind of wax. As the eggs hatch, the larvae eat their provision of pollen/nectar/wood pellet to gain energy. By the summer, the larva has consumed all of its provisions and begins spinning a cocoon around itself and enters the pupal stage, and the adult matures either in the fall or winter, hibernating inside its cocoon.

I thought I might try to make a bee house for these little bees. Instead of buying wood and drilling holes in it, and being of the mind to reuse rather than throw out some Salvia apiana (White Bee Sage) flower stalks after they had flowered (and fed many a hummingbird and Carpenter Bee), I thought I might cut them and dry them to see if the tubes would work. The stems are hollow and reed-like, of varying diameters.

 

 

I cut the long flower stalk just below where the flowers end, where it joins the rest of the plant.

There were plenty of leaves that can be dried for making sage bundles for smudging.

I cut the stalks into 4-6 inch sections. Where the flower stems grew at the node, it narrowed down the space in the tube.

 I took a metal skewer and carefully hollowed out the inside of the tubes.

 

I used flexible green garden tape to hold them all together.

 

 Here is the house, attached to the side of my pygmy palm near the house. It is shaded, but gets morning sun. I have no idea if it will work, but I will keep you all posted! Happy Pollinating!