The elderberry bushes around Ottawa were in stunning, full bloom a week or two ago. So we gathered some heavy, berry-laden branches and set about making a dye bath from their lovely purple gems.

We put them in a huge pot with lots of water, and slowly cooked them for many hours.

This is some of the lovely purple dye “wine” we ended up with.

Meanwhile, we slowly heated some alum powder with water in another dye pot, and soaked / gently cooked some cotton strips and a square Waldorf playsilk.

Here we ended up putting the fibres directly into our plant-filled dye bath.

And this is what we ended up with – lovely, rich purples.

The cotton strips are shown in the front (and are still a little wet).

It’s so interesting how the different fibres take on the color differently – I only wonder how rich the purple would have been if I’d used some wool roving. Luckily I’ve stashed a big bag of elderberries in our freezer for some purple dyeing this winter.

And here are some cotton strips (on the left) dyed with iron mordant and the elderberry dye bath. We were not too impressed with the color and preferred the alum for this particular dyeing process. Iron is said to often darken the colors but here it didn’t go as planned. Perhaps our iron mordant – the particular plant – who knows?

I guess that’s all part of the beauty of natural dyeing – you just never know what you’re going to get.

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You really never know what you’re going to get! There are so many wonderful surprises hidden away in natural dyeing. Sometimes gorgeous bright flowers yield no dye bath color at all, while the common and plentiful acorn gives us tremendous, rich hues.

While we were out picking acorn caps the other day, we decided to keep a small bag of actual acorns, wondering what they would give us in natural color.

Once they had been soaked for a day or two, I broke open the shells to allow the “meat” to offer up the dye color held inside. This was far easier and less time-consuming than peeling off the hard outer shells.

After another day of slow cooking, we got a rich brown dye bath from the acorns.

And while we finished off the acorn dye bath, we soaked some cotton strips in alum (slowly heating the cotton in alum crystals and water, then letting them soak for about 20 minutes – you can always do longer but this isn’t necessary for acorns, as you will see).

Then we added just a little bit of iron mordant into our alum water (from the rusty old iron nails jar we had sitting outside for the last few months).

Once we carefully moved the cotton strips over into the acorn dye bath, it immediately turned a rich shade of dark purple! The iron mordant worked beautifully, in combination with the alum mordant, and our cotton turned out beautifully. I later dyed a playsilk with the leftover acorn dye bath (now a gorgeous shade of metallic purple-gray thanks to the iron modant) and will be putting it up in the shop with a few others as part of a special, one of a kind set representing the 5 Chinese elements – metal, wood, fire, earth and water.

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Sneaking in a little bit of plant dyeing these days has been a little challenging for my big girl and I. The man-cub is trying to speak, using his sweet little pointer a lot, and very incredibly restless at night. But the plants are fresh now, right now, and capturing their color in dye baths and (hopefully) onto fabrics and fibres is, well, imminently important.

(photo at top shows turmeric – gold and avocado skin – purple, both with alum-dyed cotton strips)

Ha! “Immenintly important” are not words you could apply to just about anything! Laundry, dishes, weeding, shop work. Sometimes it feels good to leave all that alone and make a dye bath.

Here’s what fresh beets gave us, on cotton strips soaked in alum for a few days.

And here are all our plant and naturally-dyed cotton strips, all laid out (note: the beet-dyed one, above, is not included).

Here is what we used, in clockwise order starting with the green in the bottom left-hand corner of the photo:

• Carrot top greens with no mordant

• Nettle dye bath (with a little bee balm dye bath added at the end) with pre-mordanted alum

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• Turmeric with pre-mordanted alum

• Avocado skins with pre-mordanted alum

• Purple cabbage with pre-mordanted alum

• Beebalm with pre-mordanted alum

• Beebalm + coffee dye bath with pre-mordanted alum

• Purple cabbage, unmordanted

• Beebalm, unmordanted

Here, a close-up of beebalm with alum (pinks), purple cabbage with alum (purple at top) and purple cabbage dye bath with baking soda to change the acidity (mottled green).

Here you can see beebalm with no mordant (light pink), purple cabbage with no mordant, and then one of my favorite – beebalm dye bath mixed with a whole espresso coffee bean dye bath, using allum pre-mordanted cotton.

Hopefully we will still get to fennel-dyeing, as well as elderberry, apple tree bark, acorns and walnuts. Phew. But breakfast first. Now. Have a great day!

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We’ve been dyeing up a storm, and now into our 2nd summer I feel comfortable sharing a little (sweet) tidbit with you, something we discovered through trial and error, and trying all sorts of plants and flowers we didn’t find information about in our books. Finding an easy, pretty pink was not the easiest thing – lots of yellows and greens and grays abound in nature, but pink (especially without mordant) was more elusive.

I have lots of photos and colors to show you in the coming days, and the pillow sham covers my little one and I made with long, thin, hand-dyed strips of cotton in so many delicate colors. And photos of our tentative forays into shibori folding, and dyeing.

By chance, last year, we discovered bee balm. One of our favorite perennial (and self-seeding) plants in the garden because it smells delightful and attracts its namesake very well. The pinkish red petals produce a beautiful pink color and here is how to prepare your dye bath.

After gathering up the petals (leaving the flower centers and seeds to dry up and sow for next year) put them in your dye pot with some water, and vinegar. We found that the acid vinegar brightens the dye bath and intensifies the pink color. Dyeing with little ones is a fantastic hands-on chemistry lesson – about what acids and bases do to dye baths. And a history lesson, about how ancient peoples (right up through pioneer days) used plants and materials from nature to color their worlds, especially their textiles. And a crafting lesson, about how to slowly produce a pillow sham cover, Waldorf playsilk or doll quilt from scratch – including the dyes.

I usually bring the pot to boil and then turn it down to a simmer. Once the petals have given all of their color (could be about an hour, but it depends on how you are cooking them down), you can strain your dye bath to remove the petals and leafy bits.

A large tea strainer works well, I’ve found.

The pink liquid is now ready to be used immediately, or stored for use later on. Below I’ve explained a little bit more about how to use the dye bath to make an eco friendly, non-toxic, naturally dyed pink playsilk, or dye cotton strips for sewing together into doll quilts, pillow sham covers or anything like that.

I generally use 30″ square playsilks, and find the beebalm produces a lovely, intense rose color on the playsilks. It’s even more saturated on the playsilks than on the cotton (see below).

To prepare our playsilks, I soak them in a bowl with hot water and vinegar (2:1 water to vinegar).

After a half an hour or so, and once my dye bath is hot in the pot once again, I unfold the pre-soaked playsilk and place it into the dye pot, where I let it sit for at least an hour, slowly soaking in the beebalm pink.

Then it’s time to rinse in cool water, and dry. A larger amount of beebalm, producing a more intense dye bath, will easily dye a few playsilks.

We also dyed some 2″ wide cotton strips, perfect for piecing together with other similarly dyed strips later on. I’ve found these work well when pre-mordanted with alum.

We found our alum at the local bulk store where it was found in the pickling section. I soaked our cotton strips in a hot water + few tbsp of alum for a few hours. You can even leave it in the pre-mordant for a day or more, until you are ready to dye with them. Then I followed exactly the same method as above, dyeing them, rinsing them and air drying them.

What sorts of plants and natural dyes have you experimented with?

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