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!