Natural Dyeing – My First Attempts – NETTLE, Black Beans, and Chokecherry

Not able to do my normal heavy lifting I’ve been trying to find some alternative pastimes that keep me outside and entertained without having to use power tools. Natural Dyeing had been on my radar and after some months of reading blog posts and scouring Pinterest I decided I had gotten enough of a jist to give it a whirl myself.

First I picked up my supplies…

• White cotton fabric from the clearance section at Joann’s Fabric
• Large enamel or Aluminum Pots and Tongs & wooden spoons
  from the Thrift Store
• Alum and Cream of Tarter (for the Mordant that holds the color to the fabric)
• Soda Ash (for scouring (cleaning) the fabrics)

Alright so from my reading the first steps are to

1. Scour the fabric and
2. Mordant the fabric…
   How do you do this? There are so many ways… but this is what I did.

A lot has to do with weighing out your dry fabric so since I had a scale laying around I split my fabric into approx. 1 pound batches.

To Scour:
I filled one of my big pots about ½ full of water, added soda ash (aka Sodium Carbonate)

soda ash (aka Sodium Carbonate)
To your water. I used about 1 ounce of soda ash per pound of fabric. Bring this to a boil and then add the fabric. Boil this for 2 hours.

After this my first 2 batches of fabric had some clear yellow water and I felt like they were pretty clean.

But my 3rd batch had water that looked like puss…

So I washed it again with another ounce of soda ash. I guess you’re supposed to repeat until you think the fabric is really clean.

Then Mordant:
There are tons of ways to mordant something, which to my understanding is to essentially give the fabric a way to hold onto the colors your going to dye with and make them fast. Some people use soy milk, rusty (iron) water, copper water, and things like that but the one that seems to be the most simple and works reliably is Alum or Aluminum Sulfate:

Alum
Yes it’s kinda toxic. I used thick kitchen gloves and held my breath when I lifted the lid to give it a quick stir. People all seem to have their own recipe for this but I used this…
¼ lb of Alum and 1 oz of Cream of Tartar per pound of fabric
I don’t really know what the cream of tartar is about but I went with it.

Fill a big pot with water, add your Alum and Cream of Tartar bring it to a boil. Add your cloth to the pot, stir and simmer it for an hour and then let it cool down over night.
Yeah it’s a long process, but I suggest getting a bunch or fabric scoured and mordanted and then you’ll have a bunch of stuff ready to use.

Now for the cool part…

Making and using the Dyes:
I started with Nettles because I was really excited about a post that showed I could get these beautiful green shades with them:

(That’s from her blog post)

So I put the nettles in an aluminum pot filled it with water just over their heads and brought it to a simmer. The key is to not let it get too hot probably not even a simmer. Then take it off the heat and let it cool with a lid on for a few hours.

Reheat to warm again and until the color of the water looks good to you.
Strain out the leaves and bring the water up in temp again, this time the water should get darker now that the leaves aren’t in it. (This did not happen to me, mine was already dark)

The green I got
Add fabric that has been mordanted and scoured and let it heat up in the water leaving it in there until your fabric looks the color you want. Actually you want it to go longer than that because once it dries and you wash it out it gets a lot lighter (and changes color).
Pull it out.
Hang it to dry.
Be…
unimpressed

Damn it… My attempts looked like dirty grease rags. I think I overheated the nettles (so be gentle on the heat)

Check out my next couple posts on this I did get some better results there…