Natural Dyes

Being a "plant person" most of my life, I've always enjoyed fiddling with plants for a useful project.  So natural dyes have been part of that fascination.  When one sees every color imaginable in nature's paintbox, it makes sense to want to capture it.  The problem with most plant-based dyes however, is that nature's palette fades.  The bloom is soon off the rose!  Plants produce their pigments for very specific, ephemeral purposes, there is no evolutionary incentive to expend the energy to make them last.  A flower's purpose is to attract pollinators, once that is accomplished, it's gone.  A fruit's purpose is to attract some animal to eat it and thereby spread the seed, and when that's done, it's done. Other pigments in plants help with light absorption and allow photosynthesis to take place under a variety of light conditions.  But the plant only expends the energy to make those pigments when it is doing photosynthesis, so those pigments aren't "light fast" meaning they degrade with exposure to light. Green chlorophyll fades the fastest, which is why as leaves die in the fall, the other colors emerge as the green fades.  But the yellows and reds and purples only last for a few weeks until they inevitably fade as well.

You can dye many things with plant pigments, but most of the dyes will fade over time.  Which is why before the advent of synthetic dyes, most people's clothing was rather drab.  Only the wealthy could afford the colors produced by labor-intensive gathering of certain natural pigments, like red produced from cochineal, tiny scale insects that grow on cactus in Mexico.  A few famous plants also produce reliable pigments such as indigo (blues and greens), madder (reds) and woad (blues and greens).  

Blootroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, courtesy of Elaine Haug, hosted by the USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database

In my North American Great Lakes woodland region, there are not many possibilities for vibrant, colorfast hues.  One example is the beautiful spring wildflower called "bloodroot" which is a threatened species so really shouldn't be harvested at this point.  It too fades with time.  

How to Prepare and Use Natural Dyes

Here is the link to a four page PDF tutorial on natural dying.  It includes information on how to gather and prepare the dye baths, and how to prepare cotton and wool for dying.  It also includes a list of locally available natural dye materials (if you live in the temperate zone in the US, that is!)  What I used for my dye baths is listed under the photos below.  These were thing I could easily find in my community in quantities sufficient to successfully dye enough product for some type of fabric project.  I chose dyestuffs that I had an inkling would work well.  Some were gathered from the Children's Garden at the Slayton Arboretum of Hillsdale College, some came from the local grocery store, and I got some at the wonderful Hillsdale Food Co-Op in their herb section.  You would have more luck if you were dying Easter eggs, as there are many vegetable pigments capable of producing vibrant colors that hold long enough to decorate the eggs and enjoy them over the Easter holiday.

LR: Henna, Blackberry, Turmeric

Top: Natural Wool Yarn
LR: Barberry (Inner bark), Black Walnut, Cherry Bark, Coreopsis mixed with Cosmos, Zinnia, Sunflower, Tansy and Marigold.

Below is a photo of those same dye materials on cotton.  As you can see, cotton does not pick up the dye nearly as well as wool.  The color variation in the blackberry/purple color is due to differences in the pH of the rinse water that got on that sample.  Henna on the cotton at the far right was almost a complete  bust but the dye-bath may have been exhausted by the time I did that sample. 

Stay tuned for my next blog with more on the chemistry of plant dyes! (Note: my mother died unexpectedly the day I finished writing this blog, and I have not been able to return to this topic since.)

 

And here is another set of colors on wool, from two years ago.

LR: Spinach and Fern, Beets, Turmeric, Tea