Dye Project

Growing & Foraging for Dyestuffs

In 2023, I grew a number of dye plants for dyeing. I also foraged for additional dye materials.

Plants Grown:

Amaranth
Black-Eyed Susan
Dyer's Coreopsis
Japanese Indigo
Lady's Bedstraw
Marigold
Madder root
Weld
Wode

Plants Foraged:

Acorn
Goldenrod
Mulberries
Mulberry leaves
Onion skins
P:okeberries
Walnut

I was also gifted a few additional dye materials, I am including them in the experiment as well.

Annato
Cochineal
Logwood
Osage Orange

2024: Dyeing

The goal is to test each dye with wool, silk, linen, and cotton. Further, each one of these will be done without any mordant and with alum and iron as a mordant. This is the ideal; however, in some cases, I am limited by how much plant material I have at hand. Also, some mordants definitely will not work for a certain plant so I will not bother with it. So while I have an ideal, there will be some exceptions. I will document it here as I go along. The current goal is to display the entire project at Atlantia Kingdom Arts & Sciences Festival in March 2025.

March 2024: Onion Skins

I decided to start with something I had done before.

We have filtered well water at my house, so I was fairly certain that I had ph neutral water. Nevertheless, I tested it before beginning.

I collected onion skins throughout the pandemic so I had a big bowl of dried onion skins to work with.

The onion skins simmered all day and rested overnight in the warm water. The next morning I strainged out the onion bits. My house smelled like soup.

May 2024: Annatto

I dyed the annatto during the Crafter's Green A&S display at Skewered in 2024. I chose annatto because I needed something that could be completed in the approximately 5 hours that the display would be active.

Crafter's Green set up.

Half the materials were mordanted with alum.

The other half was not mordanted and was placed in a pot with iron added to the dye bath.

Alum mordanted fabric in the pot.

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