Last year I played with hammering flowers to extract their dye. These things are always fun to try and learn from. For thousands of year humans have used natural dyes for their art work and the carpets of the Far East are probably some of the great examples of what rich colours can be obtained. There is a fine line between chemical dyes and natural dyes because pigment is pigment after all. However, synthetic pigment requires a lot more chemical interaction and process. It is not my goal to complicate things and I want to be able to do things in as natural a way as possible.

As many children do, as a child I would pick rose petals and steep in water anticipating a scented, pink ‘Eau de Toilette’ as a reward. It never worked of course and my mother would get frustrated as I asked for the smelly mixture to rest just a little while longer hoping some magical transformation would occur. Leaving blackberries in water for a day or two I would hope to extract that deep purple colour for ink! Of course I know a little more now but not a great deal more.

I want to use handy everyday materials to accomplish a little eco dyeing and preserve the beauty of my garden flowers. I found last year that retaining the dye in the fabric was not an easy thing to do. We used home made mordants which are fixatives for dye but by rolling our carefully laid out petals within the fabric the pattern was not retained and the natural dyes mixed together to create a unique design which was pretty but not exactly what I wanted for a final result. The experience was so much fun and I am thankful to a friend for encouraging me to persist. The flowers left for winter hibernation and I put the thought on the shelf, almost. I did start some home made mordant that could brew ’til this summer.

I had made some cards last year by hammering flowers on to a water colour paper and I used those up at Christmas and for special occasions so it was time to get busy again.

My friend had given me a jar of iron mordant so I started a jar of copper mordant which works equally well I am told. These natural home made mordants are used to condition fabric so that it will absorb and hold dyes, fix them. Iron oxide can be made by dropping some iron nails or other into a jar of water and leaving for a few weeks until the chemical reaction forms the brown iron oxide liquid. I used iron acetate – iron covered with vinegar. A piece of copper dropped into a jar of vinegar will produce a pale blue mordant of copper acetate. My copper mordant sat all winter and became a beautiful clear blue. The iron mordant gradually separated into layers of clear rusty liquid to more grainy stuff which contained precipitated iron.

I had read a few blogs on eco-dyeing over winter and watched some videos but the process of retaining colour was hard to nail down to something really simple. So I persisted with my own experiment. I had an old pure cotton shower curtain, which along with pure cotton white bar towels, tea towels, I prewashed thoroughly to remove any lingering detergents. With my mordants ready, I soaked pieces of fabric, some in each mordant for twenty four hours. After allowing them to dry I got back to hammering flowers! I used an old sheet over the flowers to form a sandwich and this way you get a double print with a more random one on the cover sheet.

This process is extremely satisfying and produces beautiful results. The difficulty comes in retaining those dyes after washing. So after letting the dyes sit on the dry fabric for another twenty four hours, with trepidation, I washed them. So far so good. I was very pleased with the result. the dyes did fade but did not wash out so this is progress. Here are the results, which are closer to what I wanted to achieve.

You may be wondering what flowers gave these dyes and it is fascinating to see totally different colours to what you might expect.

The rusty coloured daylily is what produced the blue print above. You may recognise the foliage of Nigella in the pictures but the blue flower was lost.

Included in some of the prints are, Monarda, Bee Balm, Delphinium, Cosmos, Cranesbill and Yellow Loosestrife flowers.

I especially like the Nigella foliage, which retained its green, the Daylily and Cosmos.

Mordant did not seem to affect colour change much but the iron mordant does leave some pale yellow in the fabric, less when only the clear liquid is used.

Many Thanks Karen for getting me going on the endless variations with eco-dyeing.