Natural Dye Starting Out

I want to share my exploration of a thirty-year plus dormant interest in natural dyes. My daughter Blue Jay will be joining me, as a father-daughter project.

My desire is not to profess expertise, but to share my exploration. Also, not part of my effort is to promote natural dyeing as an attractive alternative lifestyle, which it may be, but just as an enjoyable and colorful pursuit. (Professor Jacobi a math professor of mine at the Thomson School of Engineering at the University of New Hampshire in the early 1970’s, prefaced his course “The Logical Foundations of Mathematics” saying that the study mathematics should have no practical application but that it’s pursuit was it’s own end.) This is the approach that I would like to take in this endeavor. No practical application, but that the pursuit is it’s own end.

For preparation and organization I’m starting with parsing natural dyes into sub-topics. There are the materials. Cotton and wool both raw and in skeins will probably dominate, unless some others present themselves as potentials. Flax, thistle, and bamboo are a few that could creep in. Then there are the mordants, the acidic or alkaline treatments of the material that cause the fabric materials to bind with the dye. Different mordants can cause different color in otherwise identical fiber and dye bath. I’ll be trying to acquire knowledge of other traditional and natural mordants. After that they’ll be the dyes themselves, divided into the subsections of plants, earth oxides, and fungi.

Blue Jay and I will be starting with plants for the dyes themselves. And relying on Rita Buchanan’s book A Dyer’s Garden, available at Amazon.com. This will have plenty of color, which Blue Jay will enjoy looking at.

The equipment will initially be rather simple stuff from the thrift stores. Pots, drying racks, a propane burner or hot plate, tongs (which I may refer to as “pants”) a filing cabinet, hanging folders will comprise the basis. Other items that we find necessary I’ll list as we go. We’ll be photographing the results and posting them (even though different monitors register colors differently). Each natural dyeing experiment will have a standard template that may include differing recipes. We’ll be filing the results in a filing cabinet. I don’t think a notebook will be adequate to the task.