Natural dyes on fabric

 I recently attended a hands-on workshop on natural dyeing process at OCAF, led by Beatrice Brown.  Bea is a local fiber artist whose work I have admired for several years and I was very excited to take this class.  During the workshop we extracted dye from natural materials, made dye pots and dying recipes for use with fabrics (cotton, linen and silk).  We also learned about mordants, tannins, dyes and color shifting using metallic salts.  Because this was only a two day workshop, the fabric was previously prepared for our use, meaning it had been scoured and in some cases mordented.  

Vegetables we used to make dyes:

• purple cabbage (chopped)
• red onions (dry skins)
• yellow onions (dry skins)
• purple beets (root only chopped)
• Avocado pits (cleaned of flesh)
• Hibiscus flowers
• Black beans (dry)

Ground pigments we used to make dyes:

• Henna
• Madder
• Gaulnuts
• Myrobalan (tannin)

Most of our dyes pots were simmered for 1 hour (some required some boiling or room temperature soaking).  The dye bath was cooled and the liquid decanted into glass jars.  To some jars we also added Ferrous Sulfate, Tannin, Alum, soda ash, baking soda, citric acid, cream of tartar, calcium carbonate or salt.  The pot on top has Avocado pits.  The two pots on the bottom have yellow onion skins and purple onion skins.

We wet the fabric and added them to the jars, tightly sealing them.  Fabric was removed from the jars when it reached the desired color.  For most jars this took an hour, however, some jars were let sit overnight to produce deeper colors.  The fabric was removed from the jars, gently rinsed, and left to dry.  

The jar below has cotton and linen fabric soaking in Red onion skin dye without any mordent.  

Below right are pieces of dyed cotton, linen and silk drying.  The pieces along the top were all dyed in Red onion skin baths, some had a mordent added to the bath.  The 9 gray pieces are from Avocado pit dyes, that had various additives.  The three in the lower left were dyed in a Hibiscus bath.

To be able to repeat our dying results, we recorded the weight of fabric (WOF), the amount of dye materials (plants, mordents, tannins and additives), and water we used to make the dye.  We also recorded pH and time the fabric was in the dye bath.  Finally we attached samples of the dyed fabric to the page.  The dye record pages are all in a  notebook for later use.  

Below are some of the swatches attached to my Natural Dye Record pages.

The top row are cotton and linen dyed with yellow onion skin.  The two on the left didn't have a mordent.  The two in the middle had an alum post mordent.  The two on the right had a tannin post mordent.

In the middle row are cotton, linen and silk dyed with madder.  The three on the left had calcium carbonate added to the bath, while the three on the right had cream of tartar added to to the bath, 

On the bottom row are cotton and linen dyed with Purple cabbage.  They show a lovely color shift due to different pH.  The two on the left, without any additives had a pH of 6.  The two in the middle had salt added to the bath until the pH was 7.  The two on the right had citric acid added to the bath until a pH of 2 was reached.