To dye for

Cast-offs from your kitchen and vegetable garden can be used to create natural dyes in a rainbow of colours, reveals Maggie Chaplin

A remarkable range of kitchen waste and plants can be used for dying, reveals Maggie Chaplin

MAKING natural dyes is a fun way to recycle kitchen waste, hedge trimmings, tree prunings and woodland finds, rejuvenating faded fabric or vintage textiles at the same time. Vegetable dyes usually work best on natural materials and a wonderful varied palette of subtle shades can be created from hundreds of readily available sources. Many of the flowers and leaves that dyers use need a mordant, or fixative, to make them colourfast, but there are plenty of other materials that don’t. If you choose one of these to begin with, you can enjoy experimenting and extend your range later. The same dye may produce varied colours on different fibres and it’s not only fabrics that take up the pigment. As well as popping scraps of silk, linen, wool and cotton into the trial dye pot, why not add buttons, shells, bleached driftwood or even pebbles to see what results they produce? Whether you give a cheery new look to a tired cotton or linen handkerchief, rejuvenate a set of table napkins or revive a jaded silk or woollen scarf, the result will certainly be one of a kind.

From the kitchen

YOU need look no further than your own kitchen for a dye source. Tea, coffee and walnut shells will all give you various shades of tan and brown, but, surprisingly, avocado stones can produce a delightful antique-rose colour and contain lots of tannin, which acts as a natural mordant. It’s best to use them before they dry out, but that doesn’t mean you need gorge on avocado—you can clean the stones, cut them into small pieces and keep them in the freezer until you’ve collected enough. A general guide is to use the equivalent weight of the dye stuff to the material you want to colour. To make the dye, soak the stone pieces in a large pan of water and leave to steep overnight, then gently heat the pot and simmer for about 45 minutes. Meanwhile, thoroughly clean the items to be dyed in mild detergent, to remove grease and fabric treatment, or they won’t take up the colour. Vintage textiles usually give good results because they’ve been washed so often. Remove the avocado pieces from the dye bath, reheat to simmering and add the washed items when they’re still wet. Remove the dye pot from the heat and leave overnight to soak, then rinse and dry the contents and you’re in the pink. For a lemon yellow, treat pomegranate skins in the same way.

From the vegetable garden

IF you’re going for gold, head to the kitchen garden and the rhubarb bed. Rhubarb acts as its own mordant and an established patch benefits from having the roots divided occasionally. Wash and chop any surplus, then proceed as for avocado stones—although it’s not necessary to soak the pieces of root overnight first to achieve your sunshine shades. Alternatively, rhubarb leaves will produce a greeny-yellow colour.

From the border

SEVERAL ornamental shrubs, such as mahonia and berberis, will yield dye material, but staghorn sumac—rhus typhina—is easiest to handle. It puts on a glorious show in late summer, when its leaves are ablaze with fiery red, orange and purple, and you can capture some of that glow with your dye. Sumac freely produces suckers that can usefully sidestep the shredder because both bark and leaves, which should be processed in the same way as rhubarb roots, are tannin-rich and valuable for producing shades of tan, rust and orange. A vegetable peeler will easily remove the velvety bark that gives the plant its common name.

From the trees

BARK from orchard, woodland and hedgerow trees can be used year round as dye material. Small fallen branches are plentiful and, whether you have one fruit tree or an orchard, there’ll be prunings. You could even investigate your woodpile. Bark can be stripped away with a sharp knife or you can cheat and simply chop up small twigs. There is a downside to using tree bark— you have to soak it for at least two weeks to extract the pigment, but it’s worth the wait. If you were expecting drab shades of brown, you’re in for a delightful surprise: elm bark, for example, yields a beautiful coral pink; malus species, wild or cultivated, can provide apricot; and, for shades of pinky-lilac, try prunus bark.

From the hedgerow

SO far, we have had shades of pink, gold, orange and lilac—but no green. It’s therefore time to don the waxed jacket and leather gloves, pick up the secateurs and indulge in a spot of hedge trimming. There’s always too much bramble, but, fortunately, there’s a potential use for some of it. Throughout the year, leaves, shoots and the long arching canes can be collected, chopped up as you go, then simmered for about 45 minutes to produce the dye, which is likely to be a yellowy-green. Blackberries give a lilac shade, but do tend to fade to a disappointing grey.