dyeing with nature

I stumbled across this beautiful and inspiring blog, via Pinterest, called Tinctory .

Eva uses silk and smocking to create beautiful pleated jewellery, but what has inspired me the most is her experiments with natural dying. Once I come back of holiday I will definitely be ordering myself some Japanese indigo plants from here and trying out some of her techniques especially the steam printing and ice flowers.

Tea to dye for

Just before starting this project I was reading a book about gardening called the Morville Year by katherine Swift. (Which I would highly recommend if you are interested in gardening, nature and the history of both. Her first book is the Morville Hours, but personally I found that a little too heavy on history and religion.)

In the book one interesting fact she highlighted was that during WWII damsons were harvested and used to dye the soldiers uniforms khaki colour. So of course I thought it would be a really good to have a go at this, only at the time of doing this project, it is spring, and damson season isn't till late summer.

So I had to think of another way that I could achieve a similar khaki colour with a natural dye that would have been available to households in WWII. Although tea was rationed like many foods, it is well known that 1940s women used cold tea to dye their legs and kohl to draw fake seams to look like silk stockings, of which there was a shortage of.

I decided to try out tea dyeing some calico and cotton voile to see whether it might be a process I could use in my final outcome.

I boiled two teabags in a medium saucepan of water and then simmered two samples for 10 mins and another two for 20 mins.

As you can see from the picture above, the two on the right that were in for the longest are slightly darker in colour. My plan is to either keep the base of the apron dress undyed or to dye the whole thing in tea to give it a khaki colour.

Using Natural Dyes

In my statement I said that I wanted to explore using natural dyes, as this is what nomadic tribes would have traditional used to dye their fabrics. After some research online, I discovered that a lot of the vegetable dyes only create muted colours, and my colour palette is quite vibrant. If I want to create a vibrant pink I would have to buy cochineal (made from a beetle) and cobalt blue is made from an mineral which I would have to buy especially as well. But I did discover that you can make a really vibrant yellow from turmeric -the spice, so using this video to help me, I tried it.

I am really pleased with the results. The dye takes really well onto the cotton scraps I used, even after just being in the mixture for 5 minutes, and being rinsed and squeezed out.

Since this is a natural dye that has been successful, I think I should incorporate it into my final samples in some way.