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.