Some weeks ago, we ate red cabbage at home. While I was preparing the salad, I remember about Abigail Booth book, saying that it was a nice candidate for natural dyeing.
So I kept the external leafs that we were not about to eat anyway, and put it into my freezer for natural dyeing experiments later.
It has been a while that I am using weld (Reseda Luteola L.) extract as dyeing material. So I tried to make a color chart using this dyeing stuff. Once again my goal was to see the different colors that can be obtained on pieces of linen and cotton fabrics, depending on the fabrics preparation, and post treatments like an iron bath or others dyeing bathes.
It has been a while that I wanted to test ecoprint using flowers. Winter is definitely over now, spring is in the air, the trees are budding and we are surrounded by blossoms blooming everywhere! I love this season!! So last weekend, nature was once again a nice inspiration (as ususal), and is decided to test ecoprint.
I recently experienced natural dyeing with sorghum extract for the first time. I bought this powder extract on Alysse Creations website quite a while ago now, but I never had time to try it. I was expected some brown shades, but the results was actually quite more interesting!
I'd like to share my experience with natural indigo dyeing.
Based on the Shibori technics, I dyed different types of organic cotton and linen fabrics.
First I had to prepare the dyeing bath, using natural indigo pigments. I learnt the process from "La Maison de l'Indigo" at Marie Galante in Guadeloupe. It is a fully natural dye bath. Michel Garcia is also using a similar process.
So I reduced the indigo powder into a hot tap water + alcohol 90° solution. Then I mixed this solution A to the dyeing bath prepared with fructose, quicklime and water heated at 50°C during 1h. It is called a "1, 2, 3" vat!
Recently I discovered by reading Rebecca Desnos' blog, that the cone pines are actually good candidates for natural dyeing. L.C. Cariou also experienced such type of natural dyeing.
Hi all, and welcome on my blog! I am happy to start this new adventure here with you. I has been now quite a while that I have started to experiment with natural dyeing, and I think that I have come to the point that I would like to share it with other pationated people. When I started my first experience in natural dyeing more than two years ago now, I was really happy to find a lot of information on the web, and I simply think that it may be my turn now!
Natural Dye and Co 