hello,
has anyone here experimented with natural dyes? i have some large pieces of cream fabric i’m going to give it a go with. just wanted to check is people have any tips or tricks that work well!
trying to get a greenish colour
Natural dyes
Nothing useful from advice but I also have plans to dye some Calico fabric green once I’ve finished wrestling the garment into shape, so I’d be interested to see your results.
A sewing pal says ‘dylon dye pods’ are great and easy to use. That’s what I was planning to use when the time comes. I don’t know if the are natural colours though.
Green dyes are some of the hardest to get naturally unfortunately! You can get a lovely dulled green dye from nettle leaves but for a more vibrant colour one of the best methods is to first dye your fabric blue using something like indigo or woad before dyeing it again with something yellow like coreopsis or marigold. I think these are fine to be done either way round!
Not sure if you need any info about mordants/binders for making the dye adhere to your fabric permanently but let me know if you do! I’ve only made natural dyed a couple of times before but it’s worked nicely with each attempt 
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Hi Peter this sounds amazing. Can you share photos of you previous attempts?
I can only find photos of brown dyed fabric, for this I used onion skins from a 20kg sack of yellow onions (also made around 5kg caramelised onions as a byproduct which was very welcome). This got a nice shade on about 6-8m^2 white cotton fabric but I’d probably half the fabric next time to get a deeper shade.
I didn’t have access to alum which is a pretty common mordant for making dye permanent so I used a soya milk bath which I’d read about from Rebecca Desnos (great source of info and have attached her site below) the proteins in the soya milk adhere to the fibres of cellulose based fabrics such as cotton and linen making them receptive to the dyes where otherwise they’d simply away!
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Wow! these look so beautiful. I really love the colour
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This is great advice! Cheers! Before going all in with the green lol. I will dye a small piece blue to see how it takes the colour.
Did your mordent work okay? I was about to order some Alum but bath milk sounds like a good alternative….
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Yes it worked great for me, I turned that fabric into napkins which have been washed a lot and have still retained their colour beautifully!
The alum method will be a lot quicker, whereas the soya milk route is the more eco-friendly option (I’d expect). Preparation takes a while longer with the latter option as you leave the fabric to soak before drying it completely, and for better results you do have to repeat this a few times to build up the amount of proteins bonded to the fabric fibres.
I’ll admit I’ve only tried dyeing a couple of times and haven’t used any chemical mordants yet, but if there’s anything I might be able to help with just give me a shout!
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Love that colour
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