I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of natural dyeing from various blog posts around the Internet, and ever since I read the recipes in the book Botanical Colour at your Fingertips by Rebecca Desnos, I decided to give it a real try. Natural dyeing is great because:
- It's affordable since the ingredients are common herbs and/or kitchen wastes.
- It yields subtle, natural colors, similar to those of stone-washed fabrics, which are so popular and unfortunately pricey at fabric stores.
- Unlike chemical dyes, it has a low environmental impact, so this process doesn’t make me flinch when I pour the leftover dye bath down the drain.
The perfect opportunity came when making the View B sample of the upcoming Swan Sling. My lining fabric, a cream/beige colored sateen bedsheet, looked a bit too pale to back my exterior, while the muted pinks that avocados yield seemed like the perfect match for the washed, slightly textured look. The lining fabric being the secondary fabric of the bag, felt like a safe space to embrace some inevitable imperfections from the process. I thought if I failed, I'd just use the fabric in its original color. Plus, we eat lots of avocados these days 🥑...
As a spoiler, it ended up as a big success!
The Basics of Natural Dyeing
Natural dyeing is, at its core, a straightforward process:
Step 1. Mordanting the Fabric
This step ensures the dye bonds to those plant-based (cotton) fibers. I like to use soy milk as a natural mordant -- technically the bonding of soy milk is not a real mordant as it's physical rather than a chemical process, but I like that my mordant is safe to up to the point that it's edible 😋. Soak, dry, and repeat 3x. The waiting in between is more of a mental commitment than actual effort (which is minimal, yay!).
Step 2. Prepping the Dye
The idea is just to use heat for those pigments to come out of the ingredients, and dissolve in water as a dye. I did this twice using the same ingredients and two different batches of water, just so that I drove more color out of them. Nothing fancy —just a pot, a strainer, some heat, and some patience.
Step 3. Dyeing the Fabric
Once the dye bath was ready, I simmered the soy-mordanted fabric in it for about an hour and then let it soak overnight. After wringing it out and air-drying, I gave the fabric a full week for the dye to settle and bond. Well, being natural dyeing, it probably isn’t something to rush if I want the colors to last.
Managing Expectations: Timing
As I have probably hinted in the steps above, timing is where natural dyeing gets tricky. It takes a minimum of 2.5 weeks to get the fabric ready to cut: a week for the soy mordant to bond, a week for the dye to settle, and extra days for air drying. If you’re working on a deadline, this isn’t a process to start on a whim -- unless you already have pre-mordanted fabric lying around. That said, this slow pace did build up excitement each day as I proceeded through the steps.
Managing Expectations: Color Outcomes
Another thing to prepare for is the unpredictability of the results. I found that when the fabric was in the dye pot, the color looked like rosewood, almost maroon -- see the picture above. But once dry, it settled into a much subtler hue—a pale, muted pink. For a fair color comparison, I put the original cotton bedsheet folded on the left.
Even after a full week of letting the dye settle, some of the color washed out during rinsing, leaving a softer tone. This wasn’t entirely unexpected, because hey, this dye came from a couple of avocados whose job was to be tasty, not colorful, so it's ok for them to be a bit temperamental. To be fair, the color took to the fabric better than I anticipated, which was a pleasant surprise. The lovely, effortless, earthy pink was exactly what I was looking for.
The dyeing process left other interesting mark as well—you can faint stripes from the way the fabric was folded in the dye bath, and a drying line where it hung to air-dry. Almost an ombre effect! Also, the two sides of the fabric also ended up in slightly different shades:
Final Thoughts
Natural dyeing is way too cool. It's like setting-up-a-harmless-small-lab-at-home-but-producing-mini-volcanos kind of cool. Who would have thought that those humble peels and pits would turn a mundane fabric into something so pretty? I'm already researching more into my local plants to see what color they'll surprise me with!
Here's a tutorial summarizing the steps -- take it and feel free to try for yourself!
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