When planning my little container garden this spring, I really wanted to include some dye plants. I don’t know how long I’ll be in this apartment, so they have to produce dye the first year (no madder for me, sadly), and I wanted plants that could double as pretty flowers in my small garden. Coreopsis tinctoria (or tickseed) and marigolds are perfect for the job. They’ve been blooming happily for months now, but I didn’t get around to dying with them until this week.

I used a solar extraction so I could start it quickly on a week day morning. I used only the petals of the marigold (they pull out easily, but sometimes bring the seeds with them. I did not use the seeds), and the entire flower head of the coreopsis. I put each type of flower in a separate glass vase. I poured in very hot (but not boiling) water, and placed the vases outside in the sun on a hot day. The coreopsis water immediately turned orange, and the marigold water a lighter green-yellow with a strong marigold scent. I dropped in a couple of swatches (although you’d get more even colors if you extract and dye in two separate steps) and left for work.

Both marigold and coreopsis are pH sensitive, in different ways. When wet the marigold color is more vibrant in an alkaline solution (that is, if you add baking soda), but as it dries this color fades. The final color is a light golden brown with baking soda, and a soft yellow-green without. Coreopsis changes color more dramatically: in a fairly alkaline solution (lots of baking soda) it makes pink, where as in neutral tapwater it makes an orangey-yellow. It tends to become more pink as it dries – a wet flamingo pink will lose it’s orange tones as it dries. I imagine adding vinegar would shift the color further towards yellow, but I didn’t test it.

Click for larger image if you want to actually read the labels

Recipe for marigold dye (dyes 1 lb fabric):

1. Collect the petals from 15-20 marigold flowers
2. Put in a glass container and pour in 6 cups hot water
3. Leave in a warm place for several hours to extract dye
4. Strain out flowers, add fabric, and leave in a warm place for at least an hour

This is the final post about the natural dyeing I did at my parents’ house over Christmas. While I was dyeing, my sister came in and made herself tea. As tea is one of the best natural dyes - nicely colored, reasonably fast, and in this case already prepared – I took the dregs of her pot and dropped in a swatch. A bit later, I did the same with my husband’s coffee.

Tea and coffee both produce lovely soft shades of brown. Tea gives a slightly warmer color, but on the whole they’re pretty similar.

Unlike the other materials I tried dyeing with, madder doesn’t grow wild around my parents’ house and isn’t used in the kitchen. You can purchase the root whole from dye suppliers, but as long as I was buying the material, that seemed like unnecessary work. Instead I bought powdered madder root from A Verb for Keeping Warm, mixed it up with warm water, and started dyeing.

Madder produces some of my favorite fabric colors. It’s also relatively lightfast, and working with the powder was as easy as using synthetic dyes. But unlike synthetic dye, I didn’t have to mix in other dyes to get a color I like. Every shade it makes is just lovely. I don’t think I’ll buy synthetic red again.

Madder is pH sensitive, ranging from yellow in acidic conditions to purple in a base. I used cream of tartar to move towards yellow and baking soda to move towards purple. I found my favorite shades were between the orangey red of neutral tap water and the wine red of a more alkaline solution.

The best part of dyeing with cabbage is watching the color change in the dye cups as you adjust the pH. Like the indicator in litmus paper, cabbage gradually changes color from red to blue as the pH increases. This makes it quite a versatile dye. It’s not very stable, but for as long as the color lasts (a few months if you keep it out of the sun), it gives you clean pinks and purples that are otherwise hard to get from natural dyes.

To make a cabbage dye, chop up a head of red cabbage into 1/2″ pieces. Put them into a pot, and fill with water until the cabbage is very nearly covered. Bring the water to a gentle simmer, then turn the heat low. Keep the cabbage warm for half an hour, then pour the water into your dye containers. I like to separate it into three or four containers and adjust them to get different colors. The dye liquid will start out purple. To turn it pink, add an acid, such as cream of tartar or vinegar. To turn it blue, as a base, such as baking soda. Play around with amounts – you can get anywhere from a dusty blue to turquoise to a pale green on linen.

This is also a great way to dye Easter eggs. Cabbage produces the perfect range of pastel colors for the purpose.

Prima came by near the end of these experiments and we dyed a set of old linen napkins, mordanted in aluminum acetate.

Onion skins might be my favorite dye. They’re always around when you want them, easy to extract, and make a beautiful array of colors. After Prima and my eucalyptus dyeing experiments, I turned to this reliably lovely dye. I started with a small batch of dye from the skins at the bottom of my mom’s onion drawer. We used a lot of shallots in Christmas dinner, so shallot skins made up a substantial portion of the mix, along with yellow onion skins, one medium sized fragment of red onion skin, and a few garlic skins which probably didn’t contribute to the color. I brought the skins to a simmer, threw a couple of test swatches into the pot, and went to bed. In the morning my swatches were a gorgeous mottled pink and yellow (top left and center of the swatches bellow). I tried a couple of other swatches (top right, and later bottom right and center), but it had been a small batch of dye and the color was quickly exhausted.

For the second batch (bottom left swatch above), I stopped by the grocery store and gathered up the skins from the bottom of the onion bins. I ended up with 30 grams of yellow onion skins and 20 grams of red onion skins. When I threw in my first test swatch, a linen which had soaked over night in aluminum acetate, it came out bright green! My first thought was that the shallots must have been responsible for the peachy pink of the first batch, and the large proportion of red onions for the new green color, but further experimentation suggested that the aluminum mordant changed the color from peach to green. Potassium aluminum sulfate (alum) had a similar effect (bottom right). After all this swatching, I dyed a square of unmordanted silk peach with white resist stitched lines, and half an old linen table cloth to a yellow green much like the linen swatches above.