Dye cloth with plants

Simmer onion skins, roots, and bark with a fixer so cloth takes color that stays through washing.

takes patience⏳ two daystradition — not yet hand-tested

Undyed cloth is the color of the sheep or the flax — grey, cream, dun. Color makes cloth yours — it marks your family and your feast days, and it hides stains. Plants all around you hold dye, and a clay pot of simmering water pulls it out.

The secret beginners miss: most plant color washes right back out unless you first treat the cloth with a mordant — a fixer that grips the cloth on one side and the dye on the other. Skip it and your bright yellow turns sad beige after two washes.

You need

• Clean cloth or yarn — washed free of grease and dirt, or the dye will sit unevenly. Wool takes plant dye more richly than linen; both work.
• A dye pot — a clay pot big enough for the cloth to move loosely. Keep this pot for dyeing only, never for food.
• A stirring stick — dedicated to dyeing, since it will stain.
• A mordant (fixer) — one of:
  • Alum — a white mineral salt, the classic mordant, if you can trade for it. Use about one part alum to ten parts dry cloth, by weight.
  • Tannin water — oak bark, oak galls, or sumac leaves simmered an hour. Free and everywhere; shifts colors toward brown.
  • Iron water — rusty iron soaked a week in one part vinegar to two parts water. Harsh: it darkens every color, and too much makes wool brittle. Use only a splash.
• Dyestuff — roughly the same weight as your dry cloth, more for deep shades:
  • Onion skins — the dry papery outer skins; strong yellow to burnt orange. The easiest first dye.
  • Walnut hulls — the green-black husks around the nut; give rich brown and need no mordant at all.
  • Madder root — chopped; gives brick red to orange. Keep it below a simmer or the red turns dull brown.
  • Oak or alder bark — tan and brown shades.
• Soft water — rainwater is best. Very hard well water dulls some colors.

Steps

1. Weigh or honestly estimate your dry cloth — the ratios hang on this number.
2. Wet the cloth thoroughly first; dry cloth grabs dye in blotches.
3. Mordant it: dissolve the alum (or make the tannin water) in enough warm water to cover the cloth. Add the cloth, bring it to a gentle simmer — steaming, small bubbles, never a rolling boil — and hold for about an hour, stirring gently.
4. Let the cloth cool in the pot, then lift it out. Dye at once, or dry it and dye another day — the mordant stays in.
5. Make the dye bath: simmer the dyestuff in fresh water for one to two hours, until the water is much darker than the color you want, then fish out all the plant bits.
6. Add the wet, mordanted cloth, fully under the surface and moving loosely — cramped cloth dyes in patches.
7. Simmer gently for about an hour, stirring, then leave the cloth in the bath as it cools — overnight is even better. Cloth dries lighter than it looks wet, so aim darker than you want.
8. For darker or browner tones, dip the dyed cloth a few minutes in warm water with a small splash of iron water. Pull it out the moment you like the change.
9. Rinse in cool water until it runs nearly clear. Squeeze, don't wring.
10. Dry in the shade. Sunlight bleaches fresh dye fast.

Watch out

• Color washes out. You skipped or rushed the mordant. Re-mordant and re-dye; the cloth is not ruined.
• Boiling wool hard. A rolling boil, or dunking hot wool into cold water, will felt and shrink it. Keep everything at a lazy simmer, and cool it slowly.
• Blotchy color. The cloth was greasy, dry, or crammed into a too-small pot. Wash well, wet first, use a bigger pot, and keep stirring.
• Iron water overdone. More than a splash makes colors muddy and wool weak. Add drops, not cupfuls.
• Using the dye pot for food. Bark, iron, and unknown plants leave residues. One pot for dinner, another for dye, forever.
• Unknown plants. Test a scrap first, and never simmer plants you suspect are poisonous — the steam and the handling are not worth it. Stick to the well-known dyes above.

How it works

Hot water pulls tiny colored particles out of the plants, but on their own most of them only rest on the fiber, so washing carries them away. A mordant bonds tightly to the fiber, and dye bonds tightly to the mordant — a permanent handshake in the middle. That is why mordanted color survives washing.