I started writing the Fabulous Fabrics series here in March, and I thought the six month mark would be a good time for a retrospective.

What I’ve liked best about doing this series is seeing the combination of creativity and passion that goes into what these fabric designers and manufacturers do.  If someone’s making organic fabric, it’s because they believe in it.  It’s not just because a market analysis told them they would make some money.  (In fact, I sometimes worry if they’re even making enough to live on, given the extra work they’re doing to source and use eco-friendly materials and fair trade practices.)  These folks really want to make a difference.

So here are the fabrics and shops I’ve covered so far in the Fabulous Fabrics series here on Crafting A Green World.  At one point I was afraid I would run out, but more and more come to my attention all the time.  So here’s the past, and I’ll see you next Tuesday to start in on the next six months!

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Leslie here at Crafting A Green World has talked to us about non-toxic dyeing using natural materials.  This collection is a larger scale equivalent of Leslie using her landlady’s plums to cook up some pretty fabric.

The collection is carried by Z&S Fabrics and Strawberry Patches, and the latter of which has some background information about the collection that is not found on Andover’s website. 

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I know that we’ve covered hemp yarn before from Lanaknits and Autumn talked to us about macrame , but it was Leslie’s quest to try natural dye that got me to take a second look at Aurora Silk’s Hemp Yarn.

At first look this yarn from Aurora brings to mind all the stereotypes that Skye talked about when she profiled hemp fabrics. But no it is Not Marijuana.

Hemp yarn is derived from the growth of industrial hemp, a different species of it’s more famous cousin. Industrial hemp grows fast without the need for much pesticides or herbicides. The fiber harvested from the plant is more commonly known as bast. Bast fibers are long and very strong and can be woven or spun to make fabric, rope or yarn.

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The most efficient form of solar technology today is (arguably) extreme concentrated photovoltaics, essentially solar panels placed under a magnifying glass. But the problem with these systems is heat.

Concentrated sunlight can melt silicon solar panels unless you include specialized cooling systems. Cooling technology costs money, and the panels require expensive tracking mechanisms to follow the sun through the day. MIT’s new solar system bypasses the heat and tracking problems all together.

Thin coatings of organic dyes absorb sunlight and redirect favored wavelengths into a pane of glass. The light is aimed and concentrated towards the edge of the pane where small solar panels are located. The concentrated light allows the panels to produce the maximum possible amount of energy all day, every day without cooling systems or complex tracking mechanisms.

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• It cannot be toxic in any way, even if the substance is natural.
• It has to be in abundance and easily gathered in nature (don’t ever take so much that the plant can’t survive or make seeds.)

I totally hit the jack pot when I walked outside to find that my landlady next door has a plum tree with a gazillion plums that had already fallen to the ground and were being eaten by bugs, rotting, fermenting, gushy etc…

The natural organic dye experiment begins…

Supplies you’ll need to cook your brew:

• Water
• Salt or vinegar
• Cooking pot ( a spare that you don’t use for cooking food)
• Measure cup
• Strainer
• White, off white or light colored natural fabric (linen, organic cotton, wool and silk are best)
• Some sort of plant, flower, berry, root, bark, etc to dye with

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Tenfold Organic Textiles

Their fabric is a 200 thread count plain weave cotton, which they recommend for quilts, clothing, and bedding. Currently the only fabric colors available are solids: madder red, pom orange, myra yellow, kasam olive, ash pink, bark brown, soot black, and sun white.

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Welcome to Earth Day, crafters! Today, in honor of our one and only home, I’m taking a break from the Fabulous Fabrics series to address a serious dilemma.

If you’re like me, you have a decent sized fabric stash sitting around. In my case, it’s quilting cotton. Yards and yards and yards of it. If you’re like me, you also spend a lot of time thinking about how you can help avert ecological crisis. When the two collide, it can produce guilt about consumption of that much cotton - which uses a ton of water to produce - as well as dyes to make it pretty.

Don’t fret! While cotton is a thirsty crop, your stash can start to make up for its ecological footprint while it awaits that perfect project. Scientists here at Crafting A Green World Laboratories have been working diligently to evaluate all the possibilities and develop this list of the Top 5 ways your fabric stash can help save the earth. (We believe these tips are also applicable to other stash materials, such as yarn and possibly ribbon, but our research is still ongoing into these supplies.)

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Photo copyright Billi-Jean.com. Used with permission.

eInsider

I did have a couple of bones to pick with the article, but there were also quite a few good things that were new to me.

First, the Green Quilts Project, founded by Susan Shie, encouraged quilters to make quilts from 1989 to 2004 to send healing energy to the Earth. I had never heard of this effort before. I also didn’t know about Mountain Mist’s Eco Craft batting, fiberfill, and pillowforms, which are made from corn fiber.

The Aurora Silk website offers natural dyes and great tutorials for using them. And it was good to see a mention of Betz White’s delicious recycled wool sweater crafts and her book Warm Fuzzies, which always make me want to buy every wool sweater within a 10 mile radius and start felting them.

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I would ask my grandmother, “Why do those tiny dye-things need such a big box? I don’t even use the rest of the stuff, and I have my own crayons.”

To which she replied, “So people don’t steal them.”

Consequently, that answer was given to me many times over during childhood, yet I noticed rolls of breath mints and tubes of lipstick eluded this logic. Nevertheless, I was optimistic each year that my eggs would be just as bright and blemish free as those on the box (they never were), and continued to wonder what would happen if I ate one of the tablets. Odds were that it would not taste like a SweeTart, turn my mouth blue for a week, and could even lead to possible gene damage. Such is the industrialization of a holiday.

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We got a tip from the folks at marthastewart.com pointing us to an article Martha Stewart had published several years ago about making natural dyes for coloring eggs. I took a look and, after reviewing the directions, decided to give it a try.I initially thought that using natural dye to color eggs would give results with colors that are paler and subtler than the colors you'd get from a food coloring box. But if you look at the final results, you can see we got some pretty deep colors. They are also more variable. Because of the long soak times needed, these will work best if you don't try for elaborate decorating schemes, and just do solid colors.My helpful assistant and I were working to get things prepared and getting the dyes on the stove as we went along. At one time, we had all four burners of the stove going with various stages of the project. You can be less ambitious than we were and just try out one of these, to see how it works. Or, if you feel like tackling a project, you can try all of them.Each dye uses the same basic recipe:one (1) quart of watertwo (2) tablespoons of white vinegarand the selected dyeing agent (just one per pot):

• 4 cups chopped red cabbage (half a head; save the other half to make slaw)
• 4 cups of chopped beets (three beets)
• 3 tablespoons turmeric (a good opportunity to use up the rest of that old bottle on the spice shelf and get a fresh one)
• (Coffee, spinach, and onion skins can also be used for other colors. You can find details for some of those on the Martha Stewart website listed below. I didn't find a recipe for spinach, but I expect about 4 cups chopped spinach would be the recommendation.)

The red cabbage dye actually ends up making the eggs blue. Beet dye yields pink to red eggs. And the turmeric dye makes yellow. Coffee gives a brown coloration, spinach makes green and onion skin produces orange (though we didn't try any of these this time).To make each dye, put all the ingredients in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil, then turn back the heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Strain out the chunks and pour the dye into a dish deep enough to cover the eggs. You can also put eggs in while you are boiling the turmeric dye to get a stronger gold color.

If you want to boil the eggs in the dye while it's boiling, you can do that with the turmeric (yellow) dye, and get some great golden yellow color on those. Boiling in the other dyes didn't produce a lot of color on the eggs we tried there.Hard boil eggs as you would normally. Then, when they are ready, set them into a dish of the dye and let them soak for half an hour to an hour. There are some combinations that can be tried, as well, but I had good results just with the basic colors. Martha's recipe called for a half-hour soak, but I wanted to see if I could get stronger colors, so I did many of mine closer to an hour, and was really pleased with the results.

If you want to go beyond a solid colored egg, you can draw a pattern on the egg with a white (or very light colored) crayon before dyeing it. The wax from the crayon will resist the dye and leave the white egg showing through. This is how we achieved the spiral patterned eggs you can see in a couple of the pictures.

After making our dyes, our used materials were able to go into the compost pile. This is a great project needing only minimal ingredients and a few hours time. Have fun, and let us know if you try this and how it turns out.

Links: Dyeing Eggs Naturally (Martha Stewart)

More dyeing pictures (Flickr)