Dyeing with Plants

Plant-dyeing is easy and rewarding. It is a wonderful project for families, classes and groups of children and adults. We always say that plant dyeing is a bit of science and a bit of art -- and, always just a bit of a mystery! Part of the fun is seeing what kinds of colors will emerge each time.

Colors will vary, depending on the quality of the water, the freshness of the plants, the plant source, the weather, and more. Overdyeing is also rewarding -- dye with one color, then dip into another color to create a third color. Will yellow from onion skins and then a dip in the pink Brazilwood make orange? Hmmm....

Plant dyeing may be done indoors, but is usually easier to do in groups outside . Have space for a table with cook stoves and pots, a space for bins of water with mordant, a hose for rinsing, and a spot to hang dyeables safely for drying.

Jennifer recently had the pleasure of leading a workshop at the Alliance for Public Waldorf Education's annual conference at Steiner College in Fair Oaks, CA. We dyed yards of silk gauze with onion skins, Brazilwood, logwood, cochineal (which are bugs that live on plants!), and copper. Beautiful!

To learn more, we highly recommend Griffin Dyework's eBook on dyeing, available in our Etsy shop. If possible come to one of Griffin Dyework's Fiber Frolics or the annual Dye and Fiber Retreat in Southern California! This year, the retreat is June 14-17.

Woven Table Runner Project

We finally finished our table runner!  Just in time for Winter.  Here is how we made it:

1.  Spinning:  In the Spring, we spun up yarns out of plain wool on our spinning wheels.

2.  Dyeing:  In Summer, at the Griffin Dyeworks Dye & Fiber Retreat, we dyed the yarns with natural plants. 

Broom & Copper = Chartreuse

Broom & Indigo = Green

Logwood = Lavender

Indigo = Blues

3.  Loading Shuttles:  In the Fall, we wrapped the yarns onto stick shuttles as we sang.

Up and down, up and down

We are making figure eights

Up and down, up and down

We are loading shuttles

4.  Warping:  We found a nice cotton crochet thread that had green, blue and ivory for the warp.  We dyed it in blueberries for a couple of days so that the colors blended well with our yarns.  The ivory parts turned lavender.  The warp thread was then wound into a ball using a nostepinne (this one in the picture is our favorite "nostie", made with reclaimed wood from Hurricane Katrina).  We then "warped up" our Ashford Knitters Loom.  The warp threads are the ones that are vertical on the loom.  They are threaded through the large and small slots on the "reed" and attached to the ends of the loom.  Warping takes time and two people to do it well!

5.  Weaving:  Taking turns each day, members of the family wove stripes with one of the yarns through the "shed" which is space between warp threads created when the reed is moved up or down.  Weaving back and forth created the "weft", or horizontal threads.  Mommy and Wilson made up a song as they wove.

Warp and Weft

Reed and Shed

We are weaving on the loom

Warp and Weft

Reed and Shed

We are learning weaving

We love our table runner!  So far, we have used it for our Nativity set and on the table under candles and food during dinner.  This is our second family weaving project.  We look forward to spinning, dyeing and weaving again in 2010!

Making Natural Playdough

We ran out of the store-bought playdough and decided to make our own. After reading through a variety of tutorials online, we settled with the following recipe...and it worked!

1 cup flour
1 cup water

1/4 cup salt
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar (you can get this at www.griffindyeworks.com)

Mix together in a pot over medium heat and stir constantly until it thickens up.

Now...regarding color and smell.

We added 1 teaspoon turmeric powder to the first batch and it came out a gorgeous, mustard-gold yellow! Ricky had the idea of adding lemon essential oil to it to make it smell good. The key is to add the essential oil towards the end of the stirring so that it doesn't disappear from too much heat.

Our next batch was supposed to be lavender or pink, so we added some leftover dye water from Brazilwood and logwood. Hmm....looks kind of tan and bland. Tried adding some copper granuals which started to blue it up, but the mixture was too hard. Also, it smelled funny! So, we tossed the second batch and decided that we loved the first batch so much, we didn't need a second color. We are going to do some more research about using natural plant extracts for dyeing playdough before make more.

Joey and Wilson got out some cookie cutters and played "Restaurant" with Mommy, making all sorts of pretend yummy things out of the playdough. We are storing the playdough in a Tupperware container and we've read that it's important to keep playing with it regularly to keep it soft. I don't think we can ever go back to store-bought playdough.

Let us know if you have experience adding natural colors and scents to your playdough!

Dyeing Felt and Silk Velvet

We've been a bit obsessed with natural dyeing lately...way too much fun! As we said in an earlier post, you never really know what colors you will get until you dye them.

Silk velvet generally absorbs dyes differently than other types of silk. Here are some of our little velvet purses that we dyed this past week. They are terrific for coins, shells, pearls, tooth fairy items, or even as an adult make-up bag or accessory. Joey likes the fuschia one!

Light blue = blueberries

Fuschia = copper, Brazilwood

Lemon yellow = safflowers

Peach blossom = madder root

Mustard = copper, turmeric

Mushroom taupe = walnut hulls

Finding high-quality felt is not easy! We found a farm that mills their own organic wool felt and it's SO thick (at least 1/4 in.) and beautiful. Hmmm...maybe a storyboard, or the base or background of a nature table, or a crown? We naturally dyed 18 x 18 in. pieces.

Earth Goddess = part walnut hulls, part copper/turmeric (this once could be the background of a scene!)

Peach/pink = safflowers

Sunshine yellow = turmeric

Lavender/burgundy = copper, Brazilwood

All items are available in our Etsy shop right now. We can't decide if it's more fun to dye up the items or use them!

Natural Dyeing

Brazilwood, copper, blueberries, turmeric, broom, onion skins, madder root, logwood...Summer is such a wonderful time to do natural dyeing...everything dries quickly in the sun and it's a great activity to do outside (if you have the right equipment...camp stove, large pots...).

Here are some of our latest dyeing projects. In our opinion, the best natural dyeing supplies and info. come from Griffin Dyeworks.

We are learning that depending on the weather, the fabric, the water, and the batch of natural dye, colors can vary! For instance, dyeing with frozen blueberries works better for us than fresh blueberries, but sometimes turns more blue/gray than lavender. Very pretty, either way. Brazilwood might turn cotton peach, silk ribbon pink or burgundy, and velvet fuschia!

No matter what, dyeing with natural ingredients is always fun and easy to do as a family. Waiting to see what color appears is part of the fun!

Natural Dyeing with Indigo

We love to do natural dyeing at home, but there are some dyes we only use when we are at the Griffin Dyeworks Dye & Fiber Retreat. Indigo is definitely one of those unique, natural dyes that is best done with masterful dyers around!

Dyeing with indigo is unique -- you can see in these pictures how Ricky is dyeing his handspun yarn. First, he dips the yarn into the blue dye pot, then he pulls it out right away. The yarn looks green! Oxidation occurs. Eventually, the yarn turns blue. If he wants it darker, he can dip it again.


We dyed our own handspun wool yarns, some silk ribbon and a few silk scarves with indigo dye this past week while at the retreat. Some were redipped for a darker color, while others were first dyed with other plants, and then overdyed with indigo. Here are some of our creations:


1. Brazilwood, then Indigo = lavender, purple, indigo colors

2. Broom, then Indigo = blue-green, lime green colors

3. Onion Skins, then Indigo = med.-deep green colors

4. Broom, then Indigo, then in the Brazilwood rinse water = aqua color

Mommy had fun using the rinse waters to change the tones a bit and ended up with some light, fairy colors! Can't wait to make the yarns into a family project. The silks will be used in our nature table and around the Dell for homelearning activities and play.