I can't believe it's nearly two years since I natural dyed and I still haven't written up a post about it! Having listened to the latest Love to Sew podcast, it reminded and prompted me to put my experience into a post. I am very lucky that I found the notebook I used at the time to make my detailed notes on my dyeing process and that I brought it with me when I moved to Bristol.
In Summer 2018 I stumbled across Rebecca Desnos' instagram account and her ebook Botanical Colour at Your Fingertips. I whole-heartedly recommend this book, it is beautifully illustrated, enjoyable to read and shows you how to dye with plants available from a range of sources; garden, wild or your kitchen. She covers important basics such as supplies needed, what a mordant is and why she uses natural mordanting methods. Rebecca uses soya milk to pre-treat her cellulose fibres and explains that this "effectively transforms them into protein fibres", thus not needing to involve any cloth made from animal's bodies. I haven't used this method yet as I just kept it simple for my first go, but I would love to move onto this next time.
She explains that avocado stones are a substantive dye, as they contain a tannin which acts as a natural mordant helping the dye to bond to the fibres. Rebecca explains the process of extracting dye from both avocado skins and stones in her book.
I didn't want to buy a chemical mordant, and I also had no idea how to, so I used an aluminium pot. She calls this "benefit[ting] from "the 'mordanting potential' of metals", while "avoid[ing] using metallic salt mordants such as alum". I agree with her when she says; "since we need to use a dye pot of some kind, we may as well choose one with a metal that is useful to us".
What you need:
A big aluminium pot- big enough to take your meterage of fabric.
Fabric. I bought two metres of white cotton from a local fabric shop. I cut it in half and used one for avocado and one for onion.
Dyestuff
Rubber gloves, muslin to strain your dye, bowls you don't mind using
Jam jars as weights to help my fabric stay submerged in the dye
A drying rack to dry your fabric on
Time!
Working out how much plant material you need to dye your fabric:
I used the 2:1 ratio of fabric to dyestuff that Rebecca recommends.
1 metre of fabric= 237g.
So I needed 118.5g of dyestuff:
1 avo stone= 42g
118.5g /42 = 2.8 (round up to 3 stones)
I decided to use a couple more stones as I had them already dried.
Gathering supplies
As my family eat plenty of avocados and onions, the hardest thing I had to find was a real aluminium pot. I was incredibly lucky that I managed to find one, as neither myself nor my family own any.
I was really lucky that I was on holiday in the countryside of South West France at the time with access to several bric-à-bracs which, besides other things, are full of lots of very old metal objects including pots and pans. The first pot I saw was aluminium but was really quite small. In the same birc-à-brac I then stumbled across a huge pot that looked perfect!
Having never used aluminium pots I wasn't sure I would know one when I saw one, but they do have a different look to stainless steel and once you've identified one you can see it. I also had my family there to helpfully double check with before I invested. Not that it was expensive, I managed to buy this huge pot for seven euros, haggling him down from 10. I honestly couldn't believe my luck.
Avocado stones
Becuase I was on holiday I had lots of time, but I was also busy doing things - the best combination really. It meant I left my dye for quite a long time in between different stages which I think helped to get it that more intense pink in the end.
You can dye using avocado skins too, so I dried out both my stones and skins. The Charente sun was perfect for this. Doing this process in rainy weather would have been much less convenient, not just with drying your dyestuff but also drying your fabric outside (as you don't want the dye to drip and stain indoor flooring) I really recommend doing it during the summer. I didn't have enough time that holiday to do both so I kept the skins and took them home. They're sitting in my big aluminium pan waiting for me!
1. Making the dye
I used 5 avocado stones. Placed these into my big pan with quite a lot of water; enough to cover them.
Simmered for 1.5 hours.
Left to cool for 3 hours then mushed up the stones a bit.
Simmered for 1.5 hours.
Left in pan overnight (off the heat) with the mushed avos inside.
2. Straining
I left the pot until 2pm the next day until I strained the mush out of the liquid.
Once strained, I put the liquid back into the pot and simmered for 1 hour.
I left the pot to cool for the rest of the day.
3. Dyeing fabric
I left the dye sitting in the pot until the evening- 9pm.
I soaked my fabric well in fresh water so that every part of it was wet.
I added about six large jugs of water to the dye mix and put in 1 metre of my fabric.
I simmered (ish) for 1.10 hours on a low heat, stirring occasionally.
I turned off the heat and left the lid on, leaving the lid on all night. I tried to make sure all bits of the fabric was submerged by using jam jar weights.
Taking out the fabric:
I left the dye pot all day and it wasn't until the next evening (8pm) that I took out the fabric.
In our utility room sink, I lifted the fabric out and squeezed out the excess dye.
I left the fabric to dry flat for a few hours before taking it in overnight to dry on a clothes rack.
You can see some more obvious colour variation here where there is a brown mark at the bottom. This can happen! I'm not really sure why, as I didn't have any plant matter left in my dye when I introduced the fabric. It might be because it was touching the site of the pot.
Overall though the colour is fairly uniform in intensity and shade. I absolutely love how it turned out.
Onion skins
I used the skin from 12 onions, which was 33g. These are actually French onions because I collected them in France but then ran out of time to do my second lot of dyeing there. I brought it all home with me to the UK.
Rebecca doesn't go through how to dye specifically with onion skins, but she has steps to follow for using any kind of dyestuff. Having done the avocado already, I knew the general method. This is what I did:
I put my skins in the pot and submerged with cold water.
I simmered for an hour with the lid on the pot.
I turned off the heat and left it in the pot from Wednesday to Saturday (4-ish days).
On Saturday, I squeezed the mushy skins with gloves on and removed them from the liquid. I then passed the liquid through a colander to get out the tiny bits.
I added my wet fabric to the pot, adding extra water to ensure fabric was covered.
I heated it for 1-2 hours.
I left to cool with the fabric in the pot for two days.
This is a bit paler than I hoped it would be, I was loving the deeper Marigold colour when it was wet. It's still a really nice shade and relatively uniform again throughout, with slight light patches here and there.
In the e-book, Rebecca says to store the dried dyed fabric for a minimum of a week before rinsing and that the longer you store it the better the colour will last. I'm not sure how long I waited but I think it was quite a few weeks. It has since been stored away from sunlight too in my fabric stash.
I am yet to make anything from both my fabrics! I really wanted to make a pair of crisp cotton Winslows for summer but of course having split my 2m in two, I now don't have enough and I don't fancy a colour-blocked look. I need to think what would suit them- Willow tanks for sure, but I'd also like to make something a bit more exciting that uses up more meterage.
After dying with avocado, I had all the beautiful dye left that I didn't want to throw away. I poured it into a large plastic bottle and it travelled the 8+ hour car journey back home with me. I planned to use it a second time to dye something that would hopefully be deeper in colour this time. I dyed a white interlock cotton LB Pullover t shirt, but unfortunately it did not work well. I don't know if it was becuase of the length of time it had been left perhaps, but not only did the fibres not take to the dye but it was also very blotchy and an odd colour:
I re-dyed this last summer (2019) using a Dylon pod in Olive along with a few other garments for Alter it August and it's now happily wearable again.
I haven't done any more dyeing since, mainly because my pot lives back at my parents' house- it wasn't really a priority to bring with me when I moved to Bristol to study a master's into a one-bedroom flat with David! I would love to dye with the leftover avocado skins as well as try out some different plants. My Auntie gave me some dried Hemp Agrimony which could be a purple dye. I'm really excited about using trying this! Maybe I will have time this summer...