Introduction: Dyeing with Plants Cultivating color, by growing beautiful plants in your garden and making your own botanical dyes, can be a wondrous experience. Whether you are an artist, a crafter, or a novice, you can easily learn how to create natural dyes from plants you have gathered or grown yourself. Soaking plant materials in water to make dye is as simple as making tea. Everyday plants like blackberries, carrots, and turmeric, to name just a few, can create an inspiring color palette. By following the simple instructions in this book, you can dye yarn, fabric, a sweater, a dress, or a tablecloth with botanical materials and transform an object into a work of art. Why Plant Dyes? Plant-based dyes offer colors that are unusual, varied, and vibrant. Colors yielded by plant materials have a rich complexity that synthetic dyes cannot achieve. Natural dyes harmonize with each other in a way that only botanical colors can. A natural dye, a red for example, will include hints of blue and yellow, whereas a chemically produced red dye contains only a single red pigment, making the color less complex. Even mixing synthetic dyes can rarely if ever achieve the range of shades that natural dyes possess. When you work with organic botanical color sources, you are literally working with living color. The unique qualities of naturally dyed textiles can often make the color vibrate or glow, which is truly magical. In a hank of gray yarn, one person may see purple tones and another person may see blues. Natural dyes are sometimes less colorfast over time than synthetic dyes, but their richness is always inspiring. Plant-based dyes offer an ecologically friendly alternative to synthetic dyes because they come from plants, which are renewable nontoxic resources and are biodegradable. Botanical dyes love all types of natural fibers from plants and animals, and bond to them readily. Natural dyes take especially well to natural fibers such as wool, silk, linen, and cotton. When choosing items to dye, however, you aren't limited to textiles and fabrics, but can dye yarn for knitting, paper, shoes, lamp shades, rugs, shells, leather, and even your hair! And you can also dye the surfaces of many other objects, like wood beads, shells, and leather. Gathering wild plant material from the sidewalks or vacant lots of your community is a good way to get acquainted with dye-producing botanical sources. Maple leaves from the sidewalk will create gorgeous pinks to deep grays and blues; fennel, which grows widely as a weed, creates bright yellows and greens. Even plants commonly considered useless weeds create some of the most striking colors: sour grass makes bright yellows on all types of natural fibers. Fruit and nut trees also create beautiful colors: fig leaves make bright yellow and green, black walnut hulls make a rich brown, and the bark of the crabapple tree yields warm tones of pink to orange. Dye plants you can grow in your garden range from onions, whose skin produces bright yellows, greens, and orange-pinks, to red cabbage, which creates shades from lavender to deep blue, to mint, which creates tans to teal-greens. You can sometimes achieve even more impressive ranges of color when using a mordant in the dyeing process. A mordant is a metallic agent used in the dyeing process that helps color chemically bind to the fiber. Some dyes will not take to fiber without a mordant, so it's important to check dye and project instructions carefully to see if a mordant is needed. However, many plants have the chemistry to allow vibrant color to bond with fiber, and those are particularly fascinating to work with. In my own exploration of color, I like to work with nontoxic natural dyes and mordants that are not harmful to the dyer or the environment. Some metallic mordants can contain toxic substances, so it's important to do your research and know your materials. With proper usage, the dyes and mordants in this book are safe to work with. Excerpted from The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes: Personalize Your Craft with Organic Colors from Acorns, Blackberries, Coffee, and Other Everyday Ingredients by Sasha Duerr All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
