Dyeing with native plants

I am recently growing an interest in dyeing fabric, mostly cotton and linen fabric with natural dyes prepared from locally available plants. I have acquired or was gifted some widely used dye plant seeds and ot will take a while for them to reach harvestable sizes. At the same time, there are already many wild trees and flowers abundant in the area without any care. So I look up these plants for their potential for fabric dyeing. Some are already well-known such as black walnut, goldenrod and queen-ann's lace. Others are less documented for their dye profile although the general colorway can be estimated by their taxonomy and color.

I did a small scale screening for some of the common wildflowers with just a handful of materials each on scoured fcotton fabric without Aluminum mordant . I also checked for the heat stability and pH sensitivity. Several plants turn out to have lots of potential and dye cotton quite easily without alum. I am further testing the pigment distribution in each of the plant and best time for harvesting. After I get that done, I will move on to optimize mordanting for better wash and light fastness.

I am mostly working with native Midwest plants and everybody is welcomed chime in and share your experience with local dye plants.

Bidens aristosa gives vibrant yellow and orange colors. It can tolerate lean and dry soil and attracts many insects, especially the soldier beetles.

If you want to avoid alum as a mordant, I've had good results using soy milk (or rather, a homemade solution of blended raw soybeans and water, which is much cheaper) to pretreat cotton and linen before dyeing.

Used that with black walnut hulls for a vibrant brown. The color was a lot lighter and muted without the soy mordant.

Silk dyes wonderfully well with almost anything, but how often does one need to dye silk.

Thanks for sharing the tips with soy milk mordant, Kena.  It is quite a different category of mordant than metal ions and tannin. I started getting intrigued by tannin for dyeing in this thread and has been focusing on copigmentation of natural dyes with tannic acid (TA) through UV crosslinking.

Persimmon, oak and walnut based TA can have high level of pigments to give a stronger background color. I have been screening other plants for lighter color to be used with my desired pigments (flavonoids) and improve their fastness to cotton. I have the following colors picked for an intended area rug. From your experience, adding soymilk (protein) can greatly improve the dyeing of walnut hulls (contain TA and other polyphenol pigments). That's very interesting to look into since adding protein will probably change the hand of fabric too, pretty much like making vegan leather.

May Lotito wrote: That's very interesting to look into since adding protein will probably change the hand of fabric too, pretty much like making vegan leather.

I haven't seen a significant difference in the hand of the fabric, surprisingly. The fabric was a little stiffer after soaking, but once washed, it got back to normal (but kept its color).

That said, I haven't washed extensively my dyed fabric yet.

Have you tried soy milk with the anthocyanine or betalain for the red and purple colors?

A few days ago I actually did a very small sample with full strength whole milk for some green color out of goldenrod. The samples just finished three days of light fastness outside and the results are interesting.

Control is no mordant, the light green color almost all faded out
With sumac leaf extract: the tannic acid improved the fastness a lot with olive green color (SLE alone is in almond color)
With persimmon leaf extract: the color from persimmon leaf per se is too overwhelming
With milk and acorn extract: stable forest green color

This is just preliminary and not a very good example for presenting but certainly it's interesting to see.

I'm a fiber artist and I work with exclusively plant (ok, sometimes insect) dyes!

I focus on getting a variety of yellows from local plants, with the occasional tan or pale green, and then adding variety with purchased dye stuffs like indigo and madder. If you're in the west Navajo Native Dyes - https://www.google.com/books/edition/Navajo_Native_Dyes/yjEOAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 is a classic written by a Diné master dyer in the 40s.

I made a bunch of sample skeins and cotton tea towels that were dyed with different yellow, then in indigo one way, and madder the other, giving a nice color wheel.

Not long ago I took a class on Mycopygments so now I'm often grabbing non-edible mushrooms and chucking them in a pot to play with. Since I often sell my yarns I can't use them for big projects unless I know it'll be colorfast.

Mary, have you tried purple corn?

The color in purple corn is a type of anthocyanine pigment, as seen in many red and purple flowers and leaves. I have tested a couple of them: the red petals of bicolor marigold and the purple basil. I just pulled a husk and gave it a quick try too. It looks quite promising as the color seems to be heat stable. I will collect the husks too after the corns are done. It takes some work to figure out how to fix the color on cotton.

Hi Pink, your yarns are so very colorful! It's a brilliant idea to have those ombre colors on fabric. I ordered some purified red and blue pigments too, and tannic acid, for quantification purpose.

I have inconsistent results with my golden aster and the flowers don't dry well, they turn into seed balls before they can get dry! It's nice you can have yours as a reliable dye plant.

Playing with persimmon leaf extract.

I love following this thread May!
Wonderful results and documentation

The woad looks great...and that looks like holy basil, tulsi.  I must have confused the tulsi seed with the weld I intended to send.  It is a lovely 'tea' basil though and sometimes reseeds.
Try the weld seed in the pkt that was late...it should be correct.

I use the entire arial parts of the plant for the dye, not just the flowers, so when I've gathered it for drying I do get the little seed fluffs, but the remaining stems and leaves still dye well. The fluffs probably help too, I just chuck the entire bag of dry stuff in!

May Lotito wrote:Hi Pink, your yarns are so very colorful! It's a brilliant idea to have those ombre colors on fabric. I ordered some purified red and blue pigments too, and tannic acid, for quantification purpose.

I have inconsistent results with my golden aster and the flowers don't dry well, they turn into seed balls before they can get dry! It's nice you can have yours as a reliable dye plant.

I am not doing a lot of real dyeing yet. I want to harvest enough materials to play with later in winter. Different parts of the plant have different pigments and they can various in stability and/or heat and pH sensitivity too. Another flower I have in abundance is bicolor marigold. The petals have mostly carotenoid and anthocyanine, the former is not water soluble and the latter changes color with pH and also not stable by itself. The center disc flowers yield a soft yellow color in neutral to high pH, I guess it's from the flavonoid of yellow pollens. If I use the whole flower, color will be muted and changes over time. Similarly in goldenrod, using the whole inflorescence with stems gives a duller golden tone and the yellow flowers themselves actually dye cotton pale green (again not light fast by itself). I am considering drying both whole flowers and parts separately. Check these out.

Soy milk is $5 per half gallon here but there is no dry soy beans in the grocery store. I checked out other beans, they all have about half the protein level (20%) compared to soy bean ( avg 40%). So I picked the navy beans because they are small and white at about $1.50 per pound.

I did a small test and the results are quite interesting. The navy bean milk does help with stabilizing colors that are pH sensitive. Those vibrant colors of yellow orange and red from tickseed sunflower all fade into apricot after washing (1:500 w/v 30 min, pH=7). With protein pretreated fabric, the colors are more vibrant and resistant, especially with dyeing in low pH.

In the midwest, a good orange can be obtained from Beggar Ticks, a three lobed leaf, I have Bidens tripartita, here are cut flowers and leaves.  Colorful tree leaves and garden herbs also make good dye.  Marigolds are great but a bit smelly.  You may have wild mugwort and maybe, unfortunately, have invasive stilt grass.  The grass can give a nice tans and golden color.  I am playing with pairing it with morning glory flowers.  I am finally getting some nice blues from this color of flower attached.  Work outside when using strong smelling herbs and definitely with other plants.  Roses when unsprayed give different colors for me on cotton, silk and bamboo.  Peony leaves make great prints.  I do not know how my water reacts to the plants.  I use tap water set out to release chlorine.  I am using alum mordant for my best dye results.  Good experimenting.

The mention of soy milk in some posts above reminded me that years ago I did some playing with John Marshall's methods for using soy milk as a binder for natural dyes.  
He says that after two weeks of drying and curing the treated cloth will resist rather than bind the natural dyes so should dye the cloth soon after treating.  
Here's his page for making and using soy milk made from dry soy beans...
https://www.johnmarshall.to/soymilk-page

Thom Bri wrote:Mary, have you tried purple corn?

If you haven't thrown your purple corn cobs to a compost pile, you may be able to make some money from natural dyers! There are loads of pigments in the cobs and they are much easier to extract than from the husks. I ate a few ears as sweet corns and reused the cobs for dyeing. All these colors came out of them! I am surprised why purple corn isn't a more popular source of natural dye.

I have lots and lots of purple cobs and husks. One thing I do NOT need is another hobby!

Asian markets will have soybeans and a variety of soybean products.

@Pink: I should've thought about using more plant parts besides blossoms. After all, those pigments are synthesized before blooming in the leaves. I remembered once I used partridge pea leaves because bumble bees love the flowers and I got gorgeous bright yellow color. Later I picked more leaves, without noticing the blooming was over and seed pods were growing and I couldn't repeat the result.

@thom: those pigments can be used for food coloring too, not just dyeing. BTW, are corn with pigmented flour have the color showing since early stage? The morado kernel's purple color is only skin deep, inside is still white atcdough stage.

@Patricia: are you using green persimmon fruits for dyeing bags? The American persimmon fruits are so small and high up the tree, how did you collect them in large quantity? I like using leaves more, I have made quite a few dye sample pieces out of the first pound of fresh leaves I picked 3 weeks ago. Extract has been at room temperature at all time without getting moldy.

If not considering wash fastness, the colorful and ready to use natural dyes are fun to play itajime shibori. So much easier to see the symmetry than monochrome dyeing.