Tag Archives: natural colour
The Market
Here is the first addition to The Market, my brand new little shop.
Wild Blueberries and Cream is a gorgeous crepe de chine silk scarf, lovingly dyed and prepared for you.
Silk Scarves
Crepe de Chine scarves in the window, utilizing the sun for solar dyeing.
Above: Red and yellow onions skins wrapped tightly in the scarf and then stuffed into a Mason jar.
Below: Pomegranate to the right. Cranberry to the left.
Washed Purple Plum
I’m amazed at how green the purple plum stayed. It seems to be a pretty solid dye. We’ll see how well it lasts though.
Washed Cotton
Some of the blueberry dyed cotton shirts after washing. It was hard to get a really good shot of the colour. Definitely much more blue then red purple. But I think that’s because I washed them in the machine and town water is full of chlorine. The red purple probably would have stayed if I had washed it in distilled water.
New Project
I’m really excited to start a new dyeing project with cotton.
I started this afternoon, but, of course, forgot to take pictures while working.
I’ll have to remember to take some tomorrow when there’s good natural light. Oh and we saw a snow goose today. So exciting! That’s bird #126.
Soaked
The colour wasn’t quite as strong as I would have liked so I soaked it overnight in the dye bath. I wasn’t sure if this would wreck the prints at all.
Fortunately when I pulled it out the next morning everything was still quite clear.
Amazingly enough the ferns, that I thought had disappointed me by not printing, showed up after the soak.
Leaving it to hang where there was indirect sunlight also might have helped.
The colours shift and morph with the light.
It’s beautiful to watch.
My Favourite Picture So Far
Little berries from the vine on our house – name unknown – wild rose leaves, purple smoke bush, maybe some purple sancherry.
I think the berry prints are absolutely incredible, so perfect!
Unbundled
I wanted a little more colour with this piece so I added 2 frozen purple irises and a whack load of dried oregano to the already murky iron bath from the last silk bundle boil.
I love how the string stripes the outer edge of the fabric.
Coral Bell’s leaf print.
Wild Rose, Purple Smokebush, Faint Coral Bell’s and the greeny one I think was a Purple Sandcherry leaf. Funny that it went green and not purpley. I have no idea why but it’s pretty cool!
The Boiled One
So far I’ve been steaming all of my eco bundles.
But then the wonderful Monika of Red2White suggested boiling them to actually get proper leaf prints.
I was a little sceptical of boiling to start with because when I was dyeing with the different flowers I didn’t want to get muddled brown. I wanted distinct colour impressions.
But for leaf prints, I realized, I wanted the shape and texture not really the colour so much so it didn’t matter if it got muddled.
I had pressed some leaves and gathered fresh ones and laid them out on a 2 yard piece of flat crepe that I had.
There was a wonderful dark, left over, liquid from previous steamings in the dye pot. I topped this up with water and boiled some big rusty bits in it for a while and then took all but one out.
The crepe was bundled and wrapped tight with string and then popped into the murky muddle for about 3 1/2 – 4 hours. I don’t remember exactly.
It turned out wonderfully!
Close up of maple leaf
Close up of rose leaves and smoke bush leaves
