Green Options » natural dye

Yearn Worthy Yarn: Aurora Silk, Hemp

Kelly Rand — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:30:39 +0000

–Don’t forget! Send in your posts for the new Carnival of Green Crafts. Taking submissions now.–

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.

DIY: Make Natural Non Toxic Dye

Leslie Richard — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:54:32 +0000

This week I have been spending a good deal of time in the kitchen, cooking up natural dyes. I am actually surprised that after 7 years of art in college I had never learned to make paints, toxic or non toxic. But after reading Autumn’s post about how to make your own milk paint, I got to thinking even deeper into how to make pigments since the colored pigment can be as toxic as the binder. What I found out was a creative revelation that I can not stop cooking up! My personal criteria for creating pigment/dye is this:

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

Yearn Worthy Yarn: Nature’s Palette Organic

Kelly Rand — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:45:47 +0000

At the beginning of May I attended the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. It is a yarn lovers dream. A weekend to really geek out over fiber. Really, it was heaven.

One of the things this festival reminds me of is the process that fiber goes through to become yarn. With sheep, llamas, alpacas and goats parading through, it is hard not to recall that - oh, yeah, that’s where my yarn comes from! It is a chance to speak directly to the shepherds and the spinners and gain a better understanding of how the yarn is produced. And Nature’s Palette is one such company that has a handle on the entire production of their yarns.

Weekly DIY: Natural Dyes for Coloring Eggs

Philip Proefrock — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 14:00:55 +0000

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)