Playing with Natural Dyes

Back to the topic of natural dyes: Mr. FL, in addition to veggies grows lots of beautiful flowers, among them, rather stunning Bearded Iris.  I'd seen on Pinterest a while back a pin about using avocado skins to dye with, supposedly turning fabric and lace a light pink,  and so we'd been having a discussion about that when he says, "I wonder if you could dye with these?"  He handed me a bunch of spent Iris blooms from one of our really dark purple plants.  I decided we should find out right then and there. I gathered up a variety of cotton and linen laces, a doily, and a piece of torn natural muslin and dyed them. Instructions can be found further down the post. I was overjoyed at the results. The color is a bit more accurate on the first two photos, but as you can see, it turned out a very nice lavender purple.  The content of the fabric you are dying affects how the pieces take the dye, just like with any other dye, so you can get lots of variation from piece to piece even if you dye everything at the same time. Makes it rather interesting I think. Is it color-fast?  I don't know.  The water ran clear pretty quick after I took them out of the dye pot and rinsed them, but since I plan on using these things for art journals and things that won't be washed, I've not taken that next step in the research.  Perhaps another day for that, oui? 


There are several books out that discuss all of the myriad of plant materials (and even bugs) that have been used for centuries to dye fiber.  I don't have one, but perhaps I should add one to my library-like I need one more "thing" to get into...sigh.  Many plant materials make a very different color to dye with than they actually are.  Like the avocado skins (more on that later in the post).

Anyway, this is a crappy picture of the Iris I used.  It is called Superstition.  If you've ever grown Iris, you know that the petals are very wet so I had an inkling that the juice from them might make a good dye having had spent heads land on  my white counter and make a nice deep stain.  The flowers are much lovelier than my photo, but you get the idea.


Here's what my hand looked like when I went out to the garden and removed additional spent heads from the plant.  Kind of like blueberry stains.  You can see the spent heads underneath-not so pretty.


There's probably loads of versions of how to dye with natural materials available, but this is what I did.

I used 6 or 8 flowers heads.  I pulled out a stainless steel pot, added some water-maybe 2 cups-ish, and about a half a cup of white vinegar and boiled it.  I then added the Iris blossoms after cutting the green stem pieces off, and boiled them for about a half an hour.  I strained the blooms out and returned the liquid to the pot. Then, I put in my WET laces and fabric and simmered them in the pot for about 30 minutes. If you want less color, do less time, more color, do more time. It will dry a little lighter than the way it looks when you first pull it out of the pot, but not too much. Rinse it in cold water until the water runs clear and then hang or lay out to dry.  It will retain a slight vinegary smell which will dissipate, but if you want to take it to the next level and try washing it, that will of course, go away. Make sure you wash it by itself just in case the color "goes away" too-you wouldn't want to send your hubs off to work in a purple tie dyed dress shirt, right?   After my fabrics dried, I ironed them since a lot of things can be "heat set" by using the higher settings on the iron.  Not sure if this was necessary, but I did it anyway.  The above process obviously didn't yield a bunch of dye, but since I was just experimenting, I didn't need a lot.

After having the success with the Iris blooms, I decided to pull out those avocado skins I'd been saving in the freezer and do the same thing with them.  In my case, I found that simmering the fabric for 30 minutes produced a very pale tan color, not too exciting.  I returned them to the simmering pot, got it boiling for just a bit, then covered the pot with a lid and turned the heat off.  I left them in the pot all day and was very pleased with the results-definitely a pinkish cast to them, not quite as pink as the pins I'd seen, but very pleasing. Who'd a thunk it? Dark green avocado skins dye stuff pinky tan.  Like I said before, some things are kind of weird and interesting like that.