Natural Cloth Dyes: A Guide to Dyeing your Own Clothes

May 12, 2011
Meera Nair

Coffee gives a brown colour - Ahmed Rabea on Flickr

Synthetic dyes are environmentally unfriendly. Use natural dyes in the form of plant materials when dyeing wool, cotton and other materials.

Your favourite white T-shirt is comfortable and just perfect for you. Naturally you don’t wish to throw it away. But after all this time, you’re beginning to hate the colour of it. You don’t want to use those synthetic dyes you get off the shelf in supermarkets because they are environmentally unfriendly. So what can you do?

Natural dyes are dyes made from natural substances, usually from the bark, leaves, roots, flowers, or wood of a plant. Until the late nineteenth century, natural dyes were the only kinds of dyes around.

Natural dyes are simple to work with, making them ideal for individuals who wish to put a little colour into their clothes. The drawback of natural dyes unfortunately is that the colours you get from using them tend to be lighter than what you will get from using synthetic dyes. Exposure to the sun may also further lighten it. This means that white or near-white clothes are about the only clothes you can dye successfully using these dyes.

Here are some suggestions as to how you can dye your clothes naturally.

Colours

Purple: Grape juice
Pink: Plums, Cranberry juice
Red: Madder root
Red-orange: Red onion skins
Yellow: Turmeric, Onion skins, Tea
Brown: Coffee, Walnut hulls
Yellow-green: Mature carrot leaves
Green: Nettle tea leaves, Horsetail tea

Making the fixative

Before dyeing your clothes, you will need to ensure that the colour fixes to the cloth, or else it will rinse off when you wash it. A natural fixative can be found using either salt or vinegar. The former is better used for fruits, while the latter should be used for flowers, leaves and other plant parts.

A general recipe for the fixative is either 1/2 cup salt to 8 cups cold water or 1 part vinegar to 4 parts cold water. The cloth will have to be soaked in the fixative for about an hour before being rinsed, wrung out, and put into the dye.

The use of a fixative is not compulsory, however. Some natural dyes are strong enough to stain the cloth without the fixative. Coffee is one such dye, as is turmeric and tea.

Making the dye

Whether you are using fruits or other plant parts, you will have to chop them up and simmer them in water for about an hour to allow the colour to be released before putting your cloth in. You may have to leave it to simmer even longer if the colour had not released very well. Alternatively, if you wish for a stronger colour, you can add more of the plant material.

Dyeing the cloth

There are many ways you can dye the cloth. Using rubber bands to tie the cloth into sections creates a beautiful tie-dyed pattern. Alternatively, you can just dunk the whole cloth into the dye and let it stain evenly. The cloth will have to be soaked overnight to ensure a strong colour.

The material you use will affect the kind of colour and the effectiveness of the dyeing. Wool generally performs best when using natural dyes, but other natural fabrics like cotton have worked fairly well.

Don't be afraid to experiment!

Most of the time, the colour you expect will not be the colour you get, sometimes even going way off the mark. Onions, for instance, can sometimes give a yellow shade, but at other times, a greenish shade. Beets, far from giving a red/purple colour, give a rusty yellow.

Try out other natural ingredients and see what colours you get. Herbal teas in particular come in a wide range of colours and can be used for dyeing. A trial piece of cloth will always help, but for the more adventurous (especially if you’re dyeing your knitting wool or cross-stitch fabric), dunk it right in and see what happens!