I love the new colors that old traditional flowers are now developed in, not wanting to start a new garden I filled up the cauldron with them and moved the basils to another pot.
Purple cone (Echinacea) is now in wonderful oranges, raspberries, and yellows and blanket flower (gaillardia) is in apricots, yellows and red.
I've read purple basil make a wonderful dye if you can get it to bond with the fabric. The water will be full of dye, it will adhere to the pot and utensils making it very hard to wash off but not the fabric.
So, I tried wrapping it up in the fabric (wool and silk) and steaming it. I steamed it a good hour, then left it sit over night, unwrapping it a couple of days later.
The color and print is beautiful on wool.
and on silk.
A couple of weeks later I picked more basil, it didn't look as colorful but I tried it anyway thinking the inside must still be full of color, but no this is what I got. Not good.
Next month I'm going to be teaching my Herb Society members about natural dyeing, we're all bringing flowers and wrapping them in silk scarves, then I will bring them home to steam for them. I've been dyeing some ahead of time to give them ideas of what to plants bring and how it will look.
This print was made with black-eye Susan's.
Burgundy blanket flowers,
Dyers chamomile,
of course eucalyptus,
and a mixture of blanket flower and dyers chamomile,
one of my favorites orange cosmos.
This is the beginning, with a few more to do before the meeting.
My water colors!
The hydrangea behind the studio are lush this year.
I love all the different shades of color. Too bad their not a useful dye color.
I caught this little fellow eating my Johnnie-jumps the other morning.
I wanted to share this with you, when one of my Herb Society members has a death in their family we bring them this arrangement of plants with special meanings:
2 comments:
The scarves are turning out great!! I heard if you put coffee grounds at the base of hydrangeas that will be very dark purple and blue...not sure if that is true, but worth a try. You are right, that it is a shame they have no use for dying fabric, they are beautiful!! Enjoy this dreadful hot weather...Deb C
I put the oak ashes from my woodstove around the plants every spring, like coffee grounds they are acidic and help turn the flowers blue. You can buy special fertilizer at the store for it also. And if you want them pink you need to apply lime to sweeten the soil.
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