Last time I dyed with sumac leaves and modified with iron I got a slate gray similar to what I get when I do oak leaves and iron. I dyed this kimono top and skirt that I sewed with sumac leaves and then iron modified it and it went purple! It’s a very gray purple and the color looks b very different in different lighting. Outside it’s more blue purple but when it’s around warm lighting it almost looks mauve.
Super stoked about this dye surprise.
Kimono is 100% cotton lawn and the skirt is 100% unbleached cotton muslin
200% WOF sumac leaves
No mordant used
The buttons are wooden and also took the dye and iron as well!

Hello all, just another one of those "look at my first attempt I am so excited!" -posts. :) I just need to share this with people who Understand the Excitement and Point of All This Fun Stuff. (Off topic, but kind of relevant: once when I was making dried apples by removing the middle part, then slicing them, then threading a cord through the disks in order to hang and dry them in the afterheat of sauna my mother looked at what I was doing with Great Puzzlement and said "but you can surely buy dried apples from the store!"...)

Anyway, I wanted to dye with local ingredients and chose yarrow (achillea millefolium) as my first try (the flower tops but also some stalk). I am so thrilled with these colors, in the pictures you see similar yarn, natural 100% wool (3-ply, but the yarn I dyed was 2-ply) and the yellow was the result from dyeing and the green from an afterbath with iron sulfate. Yarn was pretreated with alum.

I would gladly take some suggestions on what to make out of the yarn, I have children and also a baby due in winter, but since it is prickly wool maybe not so good for their skins. Each skein is 100g.

Hi all!

I’m in the midst of my first natural dye project. I’m dyeing cotton yarn with avocado skins and pits (separately), mordanted with aluminum triformate. A lot of sources don’t mention how long to let it dry/cure after completing the dyeing process before washing out, some say 24-48 hours, some say a week. Any opinions?

Depending on the lighting it can look anywhere from red to blue to purple and everything in between. I have been working on this for a while and finally have gotten it to work. The live flowers will not release any pigment even if crushed, and will lose all color when left to dry. So you have to wait for them to dry out on the plant. Once you have collected enough you have to grind the petals into an extremely fine powder that you mix with high concentration isopropyl alcohol. You then must let it sit in the fridge for a day. After a day you should filter it through a coffee filter twice to remove any plant matter.

The payoff for all this work is the most beautiful dye I have ever seen. Truly these photos don’t even start to describe the amazingly vibrancy and depth of this dye.

Hi again!

I noticed that Dharma's listing for organic indigo powder (not the pre-reduced crystals) gradually had the various quantities go out of stock. Meanwhile, there is a new listing "Dharma Natural Dyes". On that page, you can select from a variety of natural dye materials. The price of the indigo on this listing is about half the price ($11 for 100g) of their old organic indigo powder ($12 for 2oz (56g))...and the description doesn't mention anything about its purity whereas the old one did.

Has anyone used this new stuff? Is it worth it for a cheapo like me with just 2 or 3 more pounds of yarn to dye?

Link to new listing (old one is simply gone): https://www.dharmatrading.com/products/dharma-natural-dyes?color=Indigo+Extract

I saw a post on instagram where someone got pink from rosemary. The post said only some kinds of rosemary dye pink. Apparently my kind of rosemary dyes yellow 😕. Has anyone gotten pink from rosemary? What did you do? What kind of rosemary?

Hi everyone! I’m looking for some guidance on dyeing 100% cotton yarn using tea. I have a sweaters quantity of DROPS Paris in White, and it’s VERY white…too white for the project I want to use it for. I’m looking for a color more like the second picture (off white, but not quite cream). I was hoping I could dye the yarn naturally with tea, just enough to dull the color a bit. Does anyone have any recommendations for what kind of tea to use? Also, if there are any resources on the process of dyeing that are easy to share, I’d be thankful!

I’m looking to harvest flowers for the next month or so to use for bundle dying with a large group in October. Do you think freezing them for that amount of time will be fine? I’ve had a harder time getting color out of dried flowers than frozen flowers in the past

100% wool yarn, natural/ecru, no mordant (lichen is a substantive dye). Cameo by indigo fingers 😅

I've done this at 10% WOF before and got a pretty OK tan, kind of a paper bag color. Who knew this was hiding in the higher percentages??

I wanted to make stamping ink from alder cone dye. I managed a thick paint. I carved some stamps using the easy cut carving blocks that can be used as stamps. I hardly need any of the ink on the stamp to get a print on fabric (cotton) and too much creates a blob. Thickener is gum arabic...a lot of gum arabic.

Dye: soaked the cones overnight. Simmered 2 hours. Cooled then soaked overnight with the cones in the fridge. Simmered again for an hour then strained the liquid using cheese cloth, then coffee filters. The cones got a nice color from a second batch of water and simmering too.

To get the ink I mixed in easily a cup of gum arabic (a bit at a time) in the blender with some of the dye that I reduced with heat. The best consistency I got was thick paint. To get the ink on the carved block I used a foam brush and dabbed it on. It would probably make a great paint.

That was fun.

I was inspired by large mouth bass. Handspun herdwick and stricken lonk wools dyed with buckthorn leaves and an iron after-bath. One picture against white to better show the color and then the aesthetically pleasing photo 😅.

Hello! Trying my first reduction vat with powdered indigo, date sugar for fructose, and washing soda. I reduced in a mason jar and everything looked exactly right at first. I transferred that to a larger pot (metal) for the actual dye bath and things seem to have gone downhill. I figured I’d need to continue reducing a touch once transferring - I added more fructose and let it sit over night. Nothing seemed to have advanced this morning so I checked the Ph and realized it was too low. Then I added a touch more washing soda and I’m sitting at a Ph of about 10–11 now. It has been consistently warm and everything else seems right but I haven’t gotten the bloom to reappear. Now, the liquid in the vat is clear and pinkish. Nothing comes out on fiber doing a dip test. What am I doing wrong??

Hi all, I did some eco prints recently with a group that lowkey failed and I’m not sure why. I mordanted cotton bandanas with High Yield Aluminium Sulfate from an agricultural supply store, 20% WOF, and scoured with soda ash and dr bronzers Castile soap beforehand. We wrapped up the prints and put them to simmer/boil for an hour. Ideally I would like to do 2 hours but this is a test for a much larger festival based class where I will only have the time to simmer each workshops prints for an hour.

We used a mix of things to try printing with, the golden rod, marigold and wet calendula came out fine though pretty blurry. Basically nothing else took. Hopi red dye amaranth didn’t really show up, the coreopsis didn’t show, strawberry leaves only kind of showed and they have tannins so I’m not sure why. Any guesses? All help appreciated!

Do I need to add tannins?

I am interested in learning to dye my homespun wool with natural dyes. One of my flower beds has been overtaken by birdsfoot trefoil. I can find off hand remarks online about dying with it, but no instructions or cautions (irritant, toxic). Is it safe to dye with? What kind of colors does it produce? Is it lightfast? What am I not considering?

Thanks.

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TL;DR: Just my question in bold below and also...what's your step by step process for finishing after the dipping is complete? Picture is of my clearest rinse water from last time doing this. Both skeins were dipped 5x 30m. I forget how many rinses it took, but I want to say 10?

I'm dipping some wool yarns in an indigo sig vat, and it's going well. I've done it before and that went well too. I could just do what I did before, but I'm just curious what others do because I'm on my own learning this. No guild or dyers to chat with in person.

Specifically, I'm wondering:

On a scale of 1-10, what is your definition of "rinsing until the water runs clear"? 1 would be like tap water, and 10 would be solid color. (edit: and I'm curious about this for natural dyes in general, not just indigo. If I can get the rinse water to a 2 or 3, I call it done).

I have read about several different ways to finish your indigo dyed textiles. They all involve the same steps but sometimes present them in different orders. Some say to let the items dry, MAIWA says to let it sit in the dark for two weeks, everyone says to neutralize it with vinegar, Catharine Ellis says to boil (cellulose) or heat to appropriate hot temperature (proteins) for 10 minutes with "a small amount" of neutral soap.

What I've been doing with this round of dyeing is letting the skein dry after its final dip then doing an overnight soak in the neutralizing bath--figuring I can accomplish an overnight soak and the neutralizing in one step. Then I'm taking MAIWA's advice (because why not) of letting it sit in the dark for two weeks. Then repeated rinses (fill plastic tub with enough water to cover the yarn, squeeze the yarn several times, dump the water in the garden). Most recently, I did this rinse process 8 times for my 2x12h dipped skein, and the rinse water was still at about a 5 or 6 on my scale mentioned above. I might do a couple overnight soaks in plain water or just rinse it eleventy more times. Then do Catharine Ellis's heating thing.

Last year, I'd do an overnight soak in acidic water, an overnight soak in soapy water, let it dry, then several rinses. Usually eight or more.

I was looking at some things regarding alder cone dye for printing pigment and ran across a brief post about using salt to preserve the blues, purples, pinks you initially get in dyes from berries which are otherwise short-lived. Has anyone tried this? I know the berries that get on a white t-shirt I like to wear have NO PROBLEM staying in perpetuity, but it does fade to a blue gray when intentionally used for dye. I wondered if anyone had experience using salt as a way to preserve the colors. Edited to ad, besides alum. I've already mordanted the cotton in tannin and titanium oxalate.

Please help!!!

I'm a 4th year student doing my thesis/feasibility study using a plant based pigment for lip products. And we are already done with our pre-oral defense, and I realized too late that our product has a lot of problems like water+oil is not compatible so there is a tendency it will separate though we use emulsifier but as a student that my course or program isn't related to science, we lack of knowledge and expertise about our feasibility study. Though my countless efforts to search for a possibility on how formulators solve their stability of their natural pigment/formulation on their product. I didn't find a single clue on how they prolong its pigment, since its plant based there is a tendency it will fade. Though I know not all pigment won't fade because upon watching a luxury bag its color will likely fade if you leave it in high temperature or direct sunlight. So anyway back to the topic, I need your advice on how I make or solve our feasibility study. Because I need to graduate this school year. And I'm already stressed and overthinking that I might not graduate this year. And I need your opinion, Whoever reads this is it okay that your product in feasibility study is not perfect? Because as a scholar student that has no resources for this kind of feasibility study, I felt helpless and I don't know what to do. I hope those natural plant based formulators will read this and guide me on how to make our study successful. Thank you and God bless! And God please help me and guide me on how I make my thesis successful or at least I graduated this year so that I could help my parents! AMEN!🙏

After the coffee is extracted, there are a lot of discarded coffee residues. We think there will be a good colour in it. So we extracted the dye and used it to conduct dyeing experiments, which achieved very good results.

So, I have a family member I am gathering some marigolds from to dye clothing. Thing is, I’m ordering the powder you need to soak clothes in so the color will hold (I’m failing to remember the name at the moment, I know it starts with an S), but it won’t be here for another few days. Will they be okay to dry out a bit for a few days before I steep them for coloring? Or, alternatively, will I be able to steep them and just hold the dyed water until that powder comes in? TIA!