Natural Fabric Dyeing--the Adventure Continues

The adventure of dyeing with natural dyes using Rebecca Desnos’s book Botanical Colour at your Fingertips continues!

Above is my last, and slowest, avocado pit dyeing. It was done without using any heat. I folded the fabric and put it in a mason jar with the lid on, using the remaining neutral dye from my avocado mash. It sat on my kitchen counter for 8 days. At that point I was thinking that it was starting that the it was all just starting to smell like a tad funky. Not wanting a fermented or moldy fabric, I pulled it out and hung it dry in the shade on my porch railing.

I really like this piece of fabric. I used Cover Wonder Clips instead of clothespins to secure the folds. They actually have a tighter grip so I got clear white squares which I love.

So that’s it for the avocado pit dye.

I have a very large patch of peppermint in my front garden. It’s in bloom at this moment and is pollinator heaven! So I picked a bunch of peppermint, flowers and all, and boiled up a new dye bath. I used one strip of fabric which had the soy milk mordant. And a strip which I had pre-soaked with 1 part white vinegar and 4 parts water. Here’s what happened.

The strip at the top, with the soy milk mordant picked up a lot of dye from the peppermint and turned a deep olive green. The fabric treated with the vinegar is a soft light green. Both fabrics were boiled together in the same dye bath.

It’s really interesting to see how the soy milk mordant really does bind so much more dye. Though I happen to really like the very pale green fabric better!

For my last natural dyeing experiment, I used yarrow, also growing in my front garden. When it first blossoms, the flowers are magenta, but then they fade to white. You can just see a trace of pink left in this cluster. As with the peppermint, I dyed both fabric treated with the soy milk mordant and the vinegar dip. Here’s what happened.

The fabric dipped in the vinegar solution at the top on the right barely picked up any dye from the yarrow. it is a very pale yellow with a hint of tan. The fabric with the soy mordant, at the bottom, picked up lots of dye and is lovely light green/tan color.

Here is a photo of the fabrics dyed with both the peppermint and the yarrow. They create a beautiful set of gradated fabrics in the yellow/green/olive/tan family.

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Top to bottom:

Peppermint on fabric dipped in 1:5 vinegar solution

Peppermint on fabric with a soy milk mordant

Yarrow on fabric dipped in 1:5 vinegar solution

Yarrow on fabric with a soy milk mordant

My neighbor just told me that I can harvest as much as I want from his sage “forest”! So stay tuned! But it will be a while. I need to treat some more fabric and then make the dye.

But in my next post I’ll tell you about a great zine which Rebecca edited and published.

Doing Natural Fabric Dyeing using the book "Botanical Colour at your Fingertips"

In my post last week, I started a review of Rebecca Desnos’s lovely book, Botanical Colour at your Fingertips. Rather than tell you all about the contents of the book, I thought I’d show you what I’ve done using Rebecca’s excellent instructions.

I do love pink, and when I read that avocado skins and pits create peach and pink dyes, that is were I decided to start. The avocado pits give a deeper color, and they are definitely easier to store, so my pink dye is derived from avocado pits.

So let’s get the dye pot on the stove to start the extractions from the avocado pits!

i have to say I was less than overwhelmed with the results I got from the first extraction from the avocado pits. The colors do get more vivid with a second extraction, but part of the problem I didn’t get a lot of color is that I folded a fat quarter of my fabric in too many layers, making it difficult for the dye to penetrate. You can see below that the color really only dyed the edges of the folds and the two bits of fabric that were the outside folds.

Avocado pit dye, first extraction, folded fabric

I also tried creating an ombré by dipping one end of some folded fabric in the dye pot and leaving the other just inside the rim at the top of the pot. It looks like he Kona® cotton didn’t wick very well. So my ombré is barely visible in the final fabric. There is almost a hard line that shows which part of the fabric was submersed in the dye.

I added some lemon juice to the first extraction to make the dye pot more acidic, and that created the lovely light brown dye. (See above top).

The color was a deeper pink with the second time I boiled the avocado pulp. (See middle fabric at top). I also use a smaller pieces of fabric with in the second dye lot which helped too.

Finally i decided to add baking soda to the dye bath to see what an alkali dye would do. One unexpected side effect of that is that the dye nearly boiled over a couple times. it really frothed up and tried to climb out of the pot! So I had to watch it closely and keep the pot on a very low simmer. It looked like the color was going to be deeper and more purple. I does have a light purple cast (bottom fabric at top) but it definitely isn’t deeper.

So that’s it so far with my adventures with natural dyeing with avocado pits. I did put the avocado pit pulp in the freeze and maybe someday I’ll see what happens with extracting a third dye pot lot with the mash.

In my next post, I’ll show you what I’ve done with plants from the garden.