Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
One of my ongoing projects is working with natural dyes. Rather than do trial-end-error on clothing - and to aid my memory - I'm doing some test runs. The other day I bought some white remnants: twill, linen/rayon blend, and muslin. I cut them into 8" squares:
I also labeled them with a permanent marker so it would be easier to separate them out later.
Next, I prepared a tea dye. The standard recipe is to make double-strength tea. My next experiment will be triple-strength. My hot pot makes four cups of water, and that turned out to be just enough for nine squares of fabric:
I soaked three (one of each) for 15 minutes, three for 30 minutes, and the remaining three for an hour. I rinsed them, soaked them for 15 minutes in a solution of 1:2 vinegar:water (1/2 c. vinegar to 1 c. water), then washed by hand in a mild soap to get rid of the smell.
This is the result:
Yep, I also marked the fabrics to show the dye and time spent in the dye. It's kind of hard to tell from the pictures, but the muslin barely changed color, even at 60 minutes. The Twill took the dye much better. I also like the color of the linen/rayon blend, but some of the fibers turned black. I'm guessing it's the taninns in the tea reacting with one of the fibers.
Next I prepared a coffee bath. I used the leftovers from the morning coffee (1-2 cups. I didn't measure), plus six cups of coffee brewed at double strength. Here's the fabric in the dye bath:
The other steps steps were the same as with the tea dye, and here's the result:
Again, it's a little hard to tell. The muslin is darker than the tea dye. This time there were no black streaks in the linen/rayon blend. The twill came out a little lighter.
I'll probably repeat the tea experiment, but with triple-strength tea.