Natural Dying - Nanking Cherries

Here is the second round in my natural dying experiment. I picked the nanking cherries off the bush in front of both ours and the neighbour's house. These tiny red Prairie cherries are a staple in my life. We had a bush in our yard growing up. Actually, it is still producing cherries at my parents' house. Usually one of the first things to bloom, the flowers are a tender pink in the spring. By August you have juicy, dime sized cherries with a small pit. Sure, they are a little tart, but they make an excellent jelly. I realized after the fact that I should have taken a picture of the cherries, but you can still check them out.

This time I used an unbleached muslin and a scrap of plain white cotton. The top photo is the before shot. For the dye I used the mash again, mixed with some juice. I made the juice by boiling down about 3 cups of berries with a few cups of water. I ended up with 3 cups of juice, 2 of which went to making some sherbet. The dye was an orange-pink colour.

To prepare the fabric I decided to treat it with a mordant, alum. Alum is toxic, if you eat a tablespoon or more. But considering it is sold in the spice aisle at the grocery store and is approved as a food additive, I decided it fit into my efforts at natural dying. I simmered the fabric in the mordant solution of 2 tablespoons alum to about 6 or 7 cups water. I know, I should measure and give you more precise instructions, but this was done after the girls went to bed. The fabric simmered for an hour while I simmered the dye solution about the same time.

After soaking in the mordant I squeezed out the excess water, but did not rinse the fabric. Then I added it to the dye and simmered for another hour, stirring to make the colour a bit more even. After an hour I turned off the burner and went to bed. This is what it looked like the following afternoon. We decided to go swimming, so I never got to it in the morning.

From that vibrant colour I got this pale pink. This is it after a few rinses with cold water.

This is it when it dried. The unbleached cotton is on the left.

I've decided to try a few more items, sticking to traditional Prairie materials. My next experiment will be with the berries of the mountain ash tree.

Natural Dyeing - Black Currants

Inspired by the look of the jellybags when I made black currant juice I decided to try some natural dyeing the other day. I saw this post on Crafting a Green World ages ago, so I had some direction.

I chose two different fabrics to see how each would take the dye. The one on the left is a traditional white on white and the one on the right an unbleached thick muslin. I first simmered them in a mixture of 8 cups water with 1/2 cup salt for an hour. I only had kosher salt and fleur de sel in the house, so kosher salt it was. The salt is supposed to act as a mordant, encouraging the dye from the juice to stay on the fabric. While that was simmering I took the mash (the berries) from the blackcurrant juice making and simmered that in some more water. Sorry, but I wasn't wasting (as I saw it) the blackcurrant juice on this experiment.


Here is the fabric just as I immersed it in the dye. I simmered the fabric for another hour on the stove. Then I shut it off and let it sit overnight.

Don't you love the colour? Here is the fabric in the morning, just as I took it out of the dye.

And here it is after a couple of rinses. The running subsided, but it was still running so I added some white vinegar to help set the colour. Unfortunately, that seemed to encourage more running... So I gave it one more rinse and put it outside to dry.

This is the end result. More grey/mauve than purple. I would hesitate to put this in a quilt that is going to be washed, but it is still pretty enough to be used in a wall hanging

If I was willing to try some non-toxic methods for dying I've had great results with the Procion dyes, but this was an experiment with non-toxic, natural dyes. I've done a bit more research since then and it seems that cottons are the worst at taking on natural dyes without a good mordant. But most of the literature seems to recommend using alum or other heavy metals as a mordant. Alum arguably non-toxic, but it isn't a gaurantee.

I am going to try some more natural dyes - nanking cherries, turmeric, and maybe some beets and onion skins. I'll keep you posted.