Natural Dyeing at Home: A Beginner’s Guide with Ceilidh Chaplin of Billynou

1. Learn everything you need to start your Natural Dye journey: Welcome to my course introduction to natural dyes. My name is Caylee, and this is my kitchen where I do most of my dyeing of garments and fabric for my brand Billy No. I'm also interested in a slow, low impact lifestyle and using natural dyes to remind people of their connection to nature. I also choose to use natural dyes because of their less toxic impact on our health and the environment around us. World of natural dyes is immense, and it is possible to learn something new absolutely every single day. But my intention for this course is to set you guys up with the basics so that you can then build on them and develop your own practice. So one of the things that I enjoy most about natural dyes is that they are alive, and this means that they kind of vibrate with the higher frequency of life. It also means that they kind of change and dance over time, and they often give us the sweetest surprises. So in this workshop, we're going to cover choosing the equipment that you'll need to get started, how to choose your fibers and fabric, how to choose your dyes. Also, we'll be covering fabric pre treatment, fixing your fibers. So modenting a couple of techniques of modenting we'll also be creating a dye bath and covering a couple of fun techniques to get your creative juices flowing. We'll also be covering aftercare. 2. Introduction to Natural Dyeing: Choosing your equipment, fibers and dyes: So depending on what die project you're choosing to do, you really only need a very small amount of equipment, most of which you'll probably have at home already. And if you don't, you can easily find it at thrift stores or car boot sales. But I'm just going to go over the basics here. So you'll need a dipot. A nonreactive dipod is what I recommend to get started with. This is a stainless steel, one that I bought from my local supermarket, with a lid. In case you want to do some steaming and to keep the heat in. So this kind of colander will be really useful. You don't actually need a real steamer, so you can see that I'm just fabricating my own. This is for bundle dyeing. But yeah, you can just pop it in, and as long as you've got a vessel with a lid, it works perfectly. You'll also need some stirring utensils. I personally like wooden ones, but stainless steel or non reactive metals are fine. Some string or elastic bands that you might want to use to keep your fabric in place, scissors, a paint brush, which we'll be using later on in the workshop. You also might want gloves or something to protect your hands and an apron. But if you don't mind getting dirty, then an aprons not really necessary. And I think that natural dyeing is less messy than people think. So another thing that's quite useful in your equipment, but not 100% necessary, but are these nut milk bags? They're quite good if you've got fine dye material or you just want to keep your material separate from the fabric in your dye bath. It makes it easier with little bits and things not getting stuck to the fabric in your dye bath. Also, you'll need some kitchen scales for weighing out mordants and weight of your fiber and weight of your dyes. Another thing you'll need when working with natural dyes is a mask just so that you don't inhale any small particles of dust when we're working with those kind of things. Just because we are natural dyeing, natural doesn't necessarily mean that everything is 100% safe. So for example, we'll be using metal mordents and it's definitely not a good idea to be mixing them into your utensils that you're eating. And also, sometimes the dyes that we use, we don't may not know 100% where they've come from or how they've been treated. So it's just really important to keep your dye stuff separate from your kitchen stuff, especially if you're dying in your kitchen like I do. So now we're going to talk about fibers. Natural dyes will only take to natural fibers. This isn't always the case. There are some kind of nylon fabrics, I think that will take natural dyes, but I don't like to work with those kind of fibers, so I just stick with natural. So naturals include two types of fiber. Have a protein and a cellular fiber. Protein fibers are animal fibers like wools and silk, and celluls fibers are plant fibers. So both of these two natural fibers, protein and cellulose have a slightly different approach to getting them to take the dye. Actually, the protein fibers do tend to have a bit more of a natural affinity for absorbing the dyes. And there is kind of a misconception that cellulars fibers are really difficult to dye, but they're not, and you can absolutely get just as amazing colors on cellulos fibers as you can on the protein fibers. One of my favorite fibers to work with with is silk, though, because it's so satisfying to work with. As it does take the colors really, really readily, you'll always get some, like, really beautiful results. So here, we've got a hank of wool, which I've had for many years, and I think it's about time I dyed it and knitted something with it. Some satin silk and some recycled silk. Here I have some heavy linen with a beautiful texture. Some cotton bananas. And some hemp fabrics, which I'm really excited to die with as I've never tried these before. So you will notice with different fibers, they will take the dies differently. So it's important to think about the results that you want from your project. Often kind of thinner, less heavy fabrics will take the dies What seems more easily, but it's just because the fibers are kind of thinner. That doesn't mean that, like, thicker textiles don't take the colors as well. I have had some really, really amazing results, even with cotton denim and thick linen. So it's mainly about how you treat the fibers. But it's important to know what the project is the goal of the project, really, that you're trying to achieve. So when it comes to choosing a dye stuff to use for your natural dye project, there are so many options. Some of what I have here are dried flowers, some from my garden and some not. There are certain flowers that are known for being kind of good dye flowers like Marigolds, for instance, um, Cosmos. These are orange sulfur cosmos and opsis. So if you're wanting to know that you're going to get good results, then I'd recommend going with the known dye stuffs or dye flowers. But I also want to encourage you to experiment and try flowers that you might not really know what the results will be because you can get beautiful surprises that way. These flowers are all dry. I have scabiosa there, but black night scabiosa Mary Golds. But you can also work with fresh flowers. So dry flowers are very useful because you can do winter dye projects. But fresh flowers just are nice to work with, in my opinion. There is not much difference in the results, except if you're bundle dying, then for example, you can imagine that here, if you're bundle dying with dried petals, you'll kind of get a speck of color that shape. But if you're bundle dying with fresh flowers, you'll have like a whole petal that can impart the color. So the shapes and textures can often be quite different. So that's something to bear in mind. Here I have some hopiOh no, these are weld seeds. I did have some sunflower hopiblack sunflower seeds, but they're not here. These are interesting because you can use them in bundle dyeing or in a die pot and they kind of create this kind of bluey, gray color depending on your fabric and your mordant. Scabiosa you'll get kind of a beautiful bluey purple. Often sometimes they'll come out green and with some exciting, like, fun techniques you can shift the color to pink. Marigolds. I just love marigolds because they smell amazing, and they're just so kind of bountiful. Cosmos are really beautiful, bright orange color, and they're also just when they're fresh, as well, they're just like I think that they're the kind of most perfect flower, in my opinion. Also have a log wood, which is a bark. This kind of is a purply color, and it's often used in creating blacks as well. Then we have things that you can easily find in your kitchen. So avocado stones. These will give you a beautiful peachy, subtle, peachy pink shade. Onion skins, amazing, really strong color, and really easy to use. I love working with them. They're really great in bundle dyeing and making dye pots, as well. Can use the red or the orange. Also, this is tumeric. You can see the orange color. So this wouldn't really be used for its, like, color fastness properties, but I like using dyes like this sometimes, especially if I'm working with kids or making and dyeing something for kids because the colors are so vibrant initially. But also, I love things like Chimeric for its um therapeutic value. So even if I mean, the tumeric is quite a strong color, but even if the colors aren't that strong, you'll still be imparting kind of some kind of therapeutic quality onto the fibers. This can be true of rosemary or lavender, as well. Like, I love those dyes for that. I've also used sage, as well, and lots of other garden herbs. So if you're into that kind of thing, they might be worth looking at. Also, here I have a natural dye extract, which is not a plant, but it's a bug, and it's called cochine. This is very, very potent, and you can get beautiful pinks and kind of reds and even purples when you shift the color with this extract or this dye. You can also buy the whole bugs and grind them up yourself. You can also get extracts from other plants as well, including things like madder and this is weld. So the extracts are interesting to work with because they are very potent. And when you mix them into your dye bath, they kind of dissolve. Whereas, if you have just the ground up dye stuff, this is weld, as well. You'll have lots of little bits, so you'll need to put this either in a nut milk bag or you'll have to strain your dye bath once you've extracted the color. This is also another favorite natural dye of mine, and it's called madder, and it's traditionally used in creating deep reds. I love it for the kind of pink shades that you can get from it. But again, this can come in extract form, or it can come in powdered form, or it can come in just like you can use the fresh cut up roots from the plant. But yeah, this is just an example. So these are just some examples of natural dyes that you can work with and what I have in my kitchen at the moment. So hopefully you can get some inspiration for where you might like to start and what colors you might like to choose or what plants you might like to choose. But also, I'd like to say that you can also forage for your natural dyes, which is a lovely way to work with them. There are things like aldo cones or acorns from oak trees that are really, really great dyes to work with, as well. So if you're interested in that, you can just go outside and have a look around and see what nature has to offer. So there we've just covered the basics to get you started and preparing yourself for your natural dye projects. I'd like to take this moment to invite you to set an intention for this course. Maybe it's as simple as just having fun and enjoying yourselves, or maybe it could be honoring the plants that you're working with as allies and partners in your creations. Whatever it is, just take a moment to ground yourselves and set that intention now. Also, I'd like to thank you for finishing the first chapter and join me in the next chapter, which we'll be covering Um, cleaning and preparing your fabrics to take the dies. 3. Scouring: Preparing your fabric for dye: So now that you've chosen the fibers that you're going to work with for your dye project and the dyes that you're going to use, the next step is to make sure that your fibers are going to accept the dyes easily and so that you have long lasting colors. This process, the first step in this process is cleaning the fibers, which is really a very important step. And in the dye world, that's known as scouring. So scouring or giving your fibers a really good clean is a really important step in the whole process if you want to get long lasting colors and even colors in your dye project. This is because sometimes in the manufacturing process of creating the fibers, the factories will use products that kind of are a bit greasy or have a kind of residue that they leave on the fiber, and it's important to get rid of those or they'll block the uptake of the dies. Also, the fibers can just be dirty, so you want to clean the dirt off them because that can also block the uptake of the dies. It is possible to find fabrics that are ready to die like these bandanas from certain manufacturers that will state that they're ready to die. In that case, it's not necessarily, necessary to scour your fibers, but if you don't know where your fabrics coming from or you don't know which factory they've been made in, then it's always a good idea to scour and make sure that your fiber is very clean before you start your dye project. So there is a slightly different process to scouring or cleaning your protein fibers as to your cellulars fibers. Protein fibers tend to be a bit more delicate. So things like wool as I'm sure you're all aware, felts easily, and the fibers are just a little bit more fragile along with silk. So there's a slightly different process to a gentiler process to cleaning those. And then with your cellulars fibers, you can be a little bit more kind of rough with these guys, although you still need to take care when cleaning them. So it is possible to buy specific detergent for wool or some stuff called orvus paste, which is good for scouring cellular protein fibers. Me personally, I use dish soap, pH neutral dish soap, if I'm scouring my delicate protein fibers. And for my cellulos fibers, I'll use soda ash and a glug of dish soap. So soda ash is this powder. It's often used in laundry detergents, and it's just very good at getting all the grease and grime off the fabric before you diet. And, you know, I'll just use pH neutral dish soap. You can also use pH neutral, a gentle detergent. Whatever you have handy is always the best, I think. The first thing you're going to need to do when you're scouring your fibers is actually weigh them dry. This is also a very important step for morditing as well. So before you do anything, you just need to weigh them. I'm going to weigh all of these together because I'm going to be scouring them all in the same pot. And that comes to 100 or say, 130 grams, and I'm just going to write that down. I have also weighed all of these out separately, so I know what they are when I'm doing my separate dyeing of each piece. Now, me when I'm scouring with protein fibers, I tend to just add a couple of glugs to my hot water. But if you want a specific amount, you could go for one or 2% weight of the fiber. So also, if you're buying specific wool detergent or orvus paste, then they'll have directions on the box of how much percentage weiter fiber of product you'll use compared to the amount, the weight of your actual fiber that you're dyeing. So as I said, for me, I'm quite casual with my weights and stuff like that. If you do want to be more specific, then one to 2% weiter fiber, it's a good place to start. But I'm just going to do a couple of glugs of pH neutral dish soap, one more for luck. And then I'm going to fill this up with warm water and bring it to a simmer. Okay. So I have my two silks and my wool here that I'm going to scour gently just with pH neutral dish soap. I'm going to turn on the heat, and I'm going to bring this pot to a gentle simmer. Now, it's important with delicate fibers like wool and silk that you don't boil them, that you treat them with respect, and just bring the heat up gently. You don't want to agitate them too much in the pot, either, so you just want to stir them really gentle because obviously, especially with the wool, you have the potential for it to felt. So I'm just going to lower these in very gently. Some people prefer to wet out their fibers. First, before they put them into the scouring pot. I don't tend to find that makes much difference, but you can if you feel like it does. So I'll leave these in here for about 30 to 40 minutes, and then I'll come back. I'll agitate them very gently, and I'll come back and check the color of the water. If the water's really grimy, then you'll want to rinse your fibers very, very carefully and then just repeat the process again. Sometimes you'll notice that the water goes very, very brown, and in that case, it's important to do another round of scouring to make sure that you've got all the grime off your fibers. If you notice that if you're scouring something like raw fleece or something like that, or you notice that your wool is particularly smelly or feels very greasy, you can also put more of the detergent or whatever you're using to scour in just to give you that extra boost of cleaning. There we go. And this is as much as I'm going to stir it really with silk and wool coming back every 5 minutes or so or 10 minutes, just to kind of give it a little gentle prod. So now I'm going to move on to our cellulars fibers. Again, important to weigh out your the weight of your dry fibers. I've also already weighed out these separately, so I know what each of them are when I want to do my individual dye projects. This is a bit tricky, but I want to say 825 grams. So the amount of soda ash that you're going to use for your weight of fiber is going to be one to 2%. And for me, I prefer things a little bit more casual, so I'll say, like, around half a teaspoon of soda ash per hundred grams of cellulose fiber. I also do like to add a little squirt of pH neutral dishwashing soap, but that's not actually necessary. It's just how I like to do it. So we had about 825 grams of fiber. I'm just going to put a mask on because it is really important to wear a mask when you're working with powders. Soap. And I'm going to put, so half a teaspoon per hundred grams. So I'm going to do four teaspoons. I'm going to do 4.5 teaspoons of sodash. Soda ash, if you want the proper name is carbonate of sodium, sodium carbonate. So I am just wetting out this with a bit of water before I fill it up just to make sure that the powder doesn't splash everywhere. A squirt cups a squirt of soap. And now I'm going to fill this up with hot water and bring it to a boil. So I've got my pan full of warm water, which I'm then bringing to a boil, and I'm going to put my celluls fibers in there. It's important to make sure that your fibers have enough room to kind of move around the pot so that the dirt can be can be removed easily. I'm gonna again, some people like to wet out their fibers before this step, but for me, I haven't really found much difference in results. I go to lower them in, make sure that they're open. And I'll bring this water to more of a boil than a simmer for the protein fibers because the cellulos fibers can handle a bit more heat. And again, I'll check to see the color of the water to see if I need to scour them again or if they're good repeat the process again or if they're good just as they are. It's going to in. And you want to be giving them quite a good amount of stirring during this process for around 30 to 40 minutes. If they're really dirty, may be a bit longer. But if you're repeating the process, then, you know, 30 to 40 minutes each time is a good amount. You can see that my pots getting a little bit full now, so I'm actually going to add some more water so I can fit this last piece of hemp fiber into a scouring pot. What you might also find happening with your fabric once you've scoured and cleaned it is that it might shrink a little bit, so it's actually very important to do this step because if you're using a piece of fabric to make a garment, you want to make sure that it's not going to shrink after. So this is going to come to a boil. And this is I wouldn't take this any hotter now, gentle simmer and a little bit of agitation. It looks like some kind of woolly spaghetti. So one more thing that I want to say about scouring, is that you might be using maybe an old T shirt or some vintage fabric like I use a lot of. And sometimes it might not be necessary to do this full process, or you might have something that you can just put directly into the washing machine. In that case, you can just put your items that you want to be scoured or your fabric that you want to be scoured if it's cellulars fiber into the washing machine and just use the soda ash as a detergent and put it on a normal cycle. And this is really helpful if you just want to do it quickly or you haven't got much time to be putting pots on your stove. Also, this wouldn't be a suitable technique for your protein fibers because like I said before, your wools and your silks are very delicate, and of course, the wool will end up getting felted if you put it into the washing machine. Okay, so these have been scouring for around 30 minutes. The water seems quite clear, so I'm quite happy with the fact that they're clean. You'll notice with wool that there's a really distinct smell, and that's the lanolin coming off it, and it'll be stronger than more that is. I just need to find a good place to take my wool. And when you're rinsing your fibers, it's important to rinse them with a temperature like this is warm water, not a temperature that's too different to the water that you have in here because that can shock the fibers. And for example, if I put this directly into cold water, all the grime that's still may be left on the fibers will just kind of cool and kind of stick to the fibers again. So you want to rinse them in water that's a similar temperature and be careful because it's hot. Oops. So I'm just rinsing really gently my wool, being careful not to tangle it up. I like that. And then I'm taking out my silk, as well. And you can see the water's not too dirty, so So I'll rinse these a bit more and then ring them out and hang them up. You keep you can dry them then to use at a later date, or you can move directly to the next step which we'll be going through in the next chapter of this course. You can see that this water is quite grimy, but not so much that I'll do another scour. What I will do now with this fabric as it's the cellulose fiber, I will take it up to my washing machine and just put it on a very quick rinse wash with a warm temperature so that it doesn't shock the fibers, like I said, in the last when I was talking about the protein fibers so that you don't get any residue that sticks to the fabric. You can also rinse these by hand, but as I have quite a bit of fabric here, I'm going to do it in the washing machine. So we've completed the first step in preparing our fabric to take the die, which is scouring or deep cleaning the fibers. And in the next step in the next chapter, we're going to be mordanting our fibers, which is also known as fixing the fabric so that the die will attach to the fabric nice and strongly. 4. Mordanting: Ensuring long lasting vibrant colours: So we've completed the process of scouring or cleaning our fibers in preparation to modent them. And modenting is the term used for fixing the fabric so that the colors can attach to the fibers, and you will get longer lasting, more durable results than if you didn't use the modenting method. There are many, many ways to modent your fibers, but for this workshop, we're going to be focusing on three techniques or three modenting techniques. We're going to be focusing on using aluminium sulfate for our protein fibers, and we're going to be using aluminum acetate for our cellulose fibers. So we're also going to explore soybeans as a binder on these pieces of fabric as well. So silk and some protein fibers and some cellulos fibers. Soybeans or soy milk are not classified as a mordant because there's no chemical bond that happens between the fibers and the soy milk like there is with the macetate and the aluminium sulfate. But they do act as a binder, so it's like almost like a bit like a glue that attracts the colors to the fibers, and they can really enhance the colors of your dye project I particularly like using soybeans when I'm doing projects with my kids or for kids because they're very easy to use. The milk is very easy to use, and also, you don't need to take any precautions when working with soybeans. So we're going to start with our protein fibers, and we're going to be using aluminum sulfate to mordant these. If you remember in the last chapter, we already weighed out the fibers when they were dry, and I've calculated this to be 115 grams. So aluminum sulfate is a powder. It's a metal salt powder. And it looks like this. It's like a white powder. And you can buy it online. And the general recommendations for the quantities are ten to 20% the weight of fiber. So I'm going to be good, and I'm going to weigh it out exactly so that you can see. Personally, I would use maybe a flat tablespoon of aluminum sulfate per hundred grams, if you prefer working in that way. But to be more specific, ten to 20% weight of fiber. So I have 115 no, yes, 115 grams. So ten would be around 11.5 grams and 20% would be 23 grams. So I'm going to go for the larger end, and I'm going to weigh out 23 grams of aluminum sulfate for modenting my protein fibers. I'm also going to put a mask on when I do this because it's a powder and you don't want to be breathing these dust particles in. So there we go, 23 grams. And for me, when I'm doing it without my scales, a per 100 grams, a tablespoon, so that looks about right to me. So I've chosen a vessel that's going to be big enough to keep my fibers in. I'm just going to pour in my aluminum sulfate. So I'm just wetting it out with a bit of water. And then I'm going to take it to the tap and I'm going to fill this up with hot water from the tap. So I've wet out the alum and it's kind of dissolved in the water, and now I'm going to fill up this pot with very hot water from the tap. So I have my fibers, and I'm going to put them into my hot aluminum sulfate bath. You don't actually have to heat up the water. As long as you start with hot water from the tap, that should be more than enough heat to kind of activate the process of the aluminium sulfate attaching to the fibers. If your tap water isn't very hot, then I would suggest heating up the water to a kind of gentle simmer before, um, putting your fibers in. And these fibers have just been scoured and cleaned, so they're wet already. This is helpful when mordanting because it means that the mordant will kind of absorb into the fabric evenly because of the wetness. If you put dry fibers in there, it's kind of more likely to have kind of even absorption, and then you'll kind of have uneven colors. So if you've scoured your fibers and let them dry, then you might want to just wet them out briefly before putting them into their mordant bath. So I have two pieces of silk, which I'm putting in first, giving them a good stir, making sure there's enough room for them to move around freely. And then the more tricky thing that we're dyeing today is the wool, and we're just going to gently lower that in. Now, these should be ready in a couple of hours. You'll want to just come back to them very regularly and give them a little agitation just to make sure that the creases in the fibers are getting the mordant to them. Again, because it's silk and wool, you don't want to be too rough, so you're just going to be really, really gentle. And they should be ready after a couple of hours. But also, you can leave them overnight to ensure that there's lots of mordant absorbed into the fibers. You'll just want to make sure that you've stirred them regularly. And if you leave them overnight, try and make sure that everything is submerged under the liquid. This is okay, really for wool if a little bits poking out because it's less visible if the dye isn't even. But if you've got a piece of fabric and it's been lying like that all night with a piece out of water, then you'll end up with an uneven dye project, so you just push all the bubbles out and put them under water. But these should be ready in a couple of hours. So the process of modenting with aluminum acetate is very similar but a little bit different from modenting protein fibers with aluminum sulfate. Again, aluminum acetate is a white powder. It often has a very vinegary smell to it, and it is a very fine powder, so it is really important to put your mask on when you're working with this. So the process with celluls fibers is mordantin in a bath of aluminum acetate. And the next step, you'll use a bath of calcium carbonate, which is basically chalk. We'll go through this again in a minute, but it kind of neutralizes and fixes the aluminum acetate very securely to the cellulose fibers. But first of all, we'll start with measuring out our aluminum acetate. So for this tutorial, I'm being very, very precise. Personally, in my practice, when I am modenting cellulars fibers, I'll do around four heaped teaspoons of aluminum acetate per 100 grams. But the kind of general guidelines is 10% weight of aluminum acetate to the dry weight of your cellulars fibers. So I have 389 grams that I've calculated this at as dry weight. So we're going to have about 38.9, we'll say 39 grams of aluminum acetate. So I'm just going to put my mask on. Oops. 40 grams. This is my aluminum sulfate, mordant bath for my cellulose fibers, and I've done exactly the same process as I did for the alum. I put the powder in the bottom, wet it out, and then I filled up the pot with hot water from the tap, very hot water. These are my pieces of damp already cleaned and scoured pieces of fiber. So again, just remembering that it's important if you're going for even colors to make sure that your fibers are damp when they're going into the mordanting bath. This is also a general rule when you're putting them into the dye bath as well. Linen. That was a piece of hemp. It's the linen. So over the next couple of hours, I'll be stirring these really regularly just to make sure that the mordant is getting into all the creases. Sometimes I even like to put gloves on and kind of massage the fabric with my hands and gloves on, just to make sure like squeezing it out and then opening it again just to make sure that all the mordant is getting into the fibers nice and deeply. And it's important to make sure again that your vessel is big enough for your fibers to move around in. This is getting a bit snug now, but it's still okay as long as I make sure that I stir. I like to give my fibers a really good stir as soon as they go in the dipod for a few minutes, making sure that they're being agitated and that they're getting that the liquid is getting everywhere into the fibers. And then I'll let them rest for a bit and then come back to them again and stir them. Again, these should be ready in a couple of hours. But sometimes I like to leave them overnight, and that's just my preference, and it means that you get a really you're very sure that all the mordant has penetrated the fibers. These are my soybeans, and you can use store bought soy milk, but I prefer to make my own because it's really easy and also the concentration, the kind of protein concentration is going to be much, much higher. So here, I've soaked a handful of soybeans. This is what they look like when they're dry. I've soaked these overnight, and they kind of swell in size. So I've soaked just a handful. I'm going to rinse this water off them now, and then I'm going to transfer them into my blender, and I'm going to add fly, add some water to my blender to create a kind of soy milk, you know, a milky consistency. Just want to say that this milk you can't drink because it's raw. You need to heat up soy milk if you're going to drink it. So this is just for more denting or binding purposes with fabric. Like I said, soy milk is a really great one if you're working with kids or you have projects for little ones in your family that you want to dye, but you don't want to be using the metal salt powders. You just want to do a nice simple project with something that you already have in your home. So have a nut milk bag here also, which is really useful for straining you'll see in a minute straining the mixture. So first of all, I'm pouring my soybeans into my blender, and then I'm going to fill it up with some water. So obviously, this is kind of not a super specific recipe, but in general, I'll do this a couple of times to get a super concentrated milk that I'll then possibly water down with a bit more water, but we'll see how much we can how much fabric we can get in. So I'm just going to take this over to the blender and blend it up. So we're gonna have this really milky kind of liquid, which we're then going to strain using our nut milk bag. I'm just going to strain this through here. I'm going to squeeze out all the liquid, and you can see we've got a super concentrated soy milk. If you're using store bought soy milk, then normally I'd use like one carton or one part store bought soy milk with about four or five parts water to fill up a bucket or to make a solution to soak your fibers in. Here, I'm just squeezing out all the liquid, and then I've got this pulp left. And I'm just going to put it back in the blender and do that a couple more times so I have a bit more liquid. Try not to make too much of a mess. Do it again. I'm just going to strain the liquid through the nut milk bag. To get a very concentrated soy milk. Then depending on the amount of fabric you have, you'll want to do same rules as usual, making sure that your fabric has some space to move around in. So I think I'm going to stop here with blending my soy milk. But obviously, I could do that again and get some more liquid out of there. But for now, I'm going to stop. Okay. So I'm going to add a couple of bowls of water to this, just to bulk up the volume of liquid, so there's enough room for my fibers to move around in there. So soy milk makes this quite satisfying, like, foamy liquid, especially when it's homemade. Just to note, this isn't hot. So soy milk you work with cool cold water, and it's actually can be beneficial if you're working in hot weather with soy milk to kind of put ice cubes in there or just keep it in a cool place because it can tend to go smelly quite quickly. So I'm putting in my pieces of silk, making sure they get a good coverage. And some in in. Now, for soy milk, I do tend to leave the pieces in there overnight to soak just to make sure that the soy milk really, really gets into all of the fabric as it's not a mordant, it's a binder and it doesn't chemically bond to the fabric. It's important that you've got a really, really good foundation layer of soymlk. After 24 hours or just overnight, I then take the soy milk pieces out of the pot and let them dry fully. It's really important when you're drying them to dry them make sure they dry flat or that you hang them flat because sometimes the creases in the fiber can create little creases of soy milk which will be a higher concentration and therefore an uneven die. But if you're not going for an even die, that's okay. I might add a little bit more water to this bowl as well just to make sure my fibers have got a bit of space. Okay. Once these fibers have dried after 24 hours or overnight soaking, you can then just dip them back into the soy milk solution maybe for five, 10 minutes just to get another layer of soy milk on onto the fibers. You can do this two or three times, or you don't have to do this at all. You can just have the overnight soak, bearing in mind that the more layers, the higher the concentration of soy and the kind of thicker or stronger the colors will be. So we've prepared our three mordents or our two mordants and our binder, aluminum sulfate, aluminum acetate, and soy milk. Now we're just letting them rest for a few hours, stirring them as regularly as possible if we're going for even colors, and then we'll come back and I'll show you the next steps. Here, I've got my samples that I modented yesterday. I've got the samples that I modented or treated with soy milk and the samples that I modented with alum acetate. I left them in the modent baths for the whole afternoon and then I took them out and I let them dry overnight. With the alum acetate, it's not absolutely necessary to let it dry. You can go onto this next step straightaway, but I like to let it dry first and then move on to this next step. And for the soy milk, you can either just work with it straight out of the soy milk bath as it is now or you can add some more layers of soy milk to it to create kind of a stronger bond with the colors. I also have my protein fibers still in the Alum bath. So they've been in there for about 24 hours now. Obviously, you don't have to leave them in for that long, but I'm just leaving them in until I'm ready to dye, because you don't actually need to dry these first before they can have another step before they're ready to be dyed, so you can go directly from this step to the dye bath. So in total, I had 389 grams of cellulars fiber to mordant with my alum acetate. So the next step for this is we want to give it a calcium carbonate bath. You can either use calcium carbonate or wheat brand has the same effect, and it's basically the same process. You create a bath either of calcium carbonate or of the wheat brand that's been soaking in a nut milk bag, and then you'll place your fibers that have already been treated with alum acetate into the bath. So we're using calcium carbonate today. And the point of this kind of step is to help set and fix the mordant to the fibers just to be sure that you've got a really strong bond between the mordant and the fiber. So in general, you'll want about 5% of your weight of fiber of either calcium carbonate or wheat bran. And that works out at about one teaspoon per 100 grams of calcium carbonate. So we've got 389 grams there. I'm just going to round that up to four teaspoons of calcium carbonate. So as this is an approximate weight, I'm not using my scales. I'm just going to use my spoon, um um pop one, two, three. Four. So I've just created this calcium carbonate bath with hot water directly from the tap. That is totally sufficient for what we're doing. It's also perfectly okay for using or for creating a bath with wheat bran as well. So I'm taking my dry pieces of fiber. They might be wet at this point if you decided to move directly to this step and just popping them in. And I'll leave them in here to soak for around I don't know, from 10 minutes to half an hour, depending on what you need to do. Making sure to give them a good stir. Once our fibers have been in the calcium carbonate bath for ten, 15, 20, 30 minutes, you can then take them out and rinse them, and then you can move directly to the dipod. These are all my soy milk treated pieces of fabric that are dry. They soaked in a pot of soy milk for around, I don't know, six, 7 hours. And now I'm just going to give them a quick dip this time. It's a bit of a different process because you just want to add another layer of soy milk to the fabric. So the long soak was to get all the soy milk to absorb into all of the fabric. And now you just want to put them back into the soy milk for around for a couple of minutes just to make sure that they're all wet, and then you can take them out again and squeeze them out and hang them to dry. And you can do this as many times as you want to build up the layers of soy milk. I'm just going to do it once. But if you want a really, really, really, really strong base of soy milk, then you could maybe do it four or five times. This also does depend on how hot your climate is as to how many dips you'll be able to do because the soil does go smelly quite quickly. So these have just been in here for a few minutes. All the fabric's wet, and I'm just going to take them back out, and then I will take them to my washing machine and just put them on a quick spin to whip out the extra moisture. And then I will hang them up to dry for when they're ready to use. So whichever mordant you've decided to use, whether you've decided to pretreat your fibers with soy milk or whether you've used alum acetate for your cellular fibers or whether you've used alum sulfate for your protein fibers, you can now let them dry for use at a later date, or you can move directly onto dyeing them while they're still wet. And in the next chapter of this workshop, we're going to be creating a dipod. 5. Creating a Dye Bath: Extracting color from nature: Now that we've prepared all of our fabric ready to accept the dyes, we're going to move on to creating a dye bath. Today I'm going to do two dye baths as examples. I'm going to create a madder dye bath, and I'm going to use some onion skins. So in general, most dye stuffs will respond really well to slow, gentle extractions. And that's a general rule you can apply to, yeah, to most dye stuffs. So there are a couple of things to take into consideration when you're preparing your dye bath. One is the water that you're using. I tend to use my tap water, but you could use bottled water, filtered water, rainwater, especially if you have maybe water that has a slightly higher pH or slightly lower pH because a lot of natural dyes are sensitive to ph, and that can affect the colors. So this is a moment where you might want to be doing some testing as well if you have a specific color in mind that you want to achieve. So another thing you want to take into consideration when you're creating your dye bath is the pot that you're using. Normally, I would recommend using a stainless steel pot because it's non reactive. These two are both aluminum, and I will be using these today because I don't generally find with these specific pots that there's much of a difference in the colors. It's just that some people say that aluminum can act as kind of an extramrdant or it can affect the colors slightly, but I don't tend to find that with these specific pots. So you might want to test your pots again. Also, if you use pots that maybe copper or something like that, you might get a different color. So in general, when you're just starting out, it's a good idea to use a nonreactive pot. So stainless steel, glass or something enamel. One of the easiest ways to get started in creating a dye bath and exploring colors is by collecting things that you might already have in your kitchen that you've used in your kitchen or that your friends have used in your kitchen. Here, I have some avocado stones. Those were the first dyes I ever played around with, and they're really amazing because you can get a lovely, lovely, peachy pink shade. You can see when the avocado stones oxidize, they kind of go this deep pinky color, and that's the kind of color you can expect from their dye bath. And their skins covering them, you can see they haven't oxidized yet. I also have some onion skins, which are absolutely one of my favorite dyes to work with, mainly because they're so easy and potent. The dye is really easy to extract. And yeah, I love the color, the orange, the bright orange that they give. You can also use red onion skins for a different shade, as well. I'm really lucky because I have I go to the market every Wednesday, and the people at the market know that I collect onion skins, so they often give me bags and bags of onion skins. So if you're not eating enough onion skins in your home, then you might want to either ask your friends or you can go around the supermarket with a little extra bag picking up onion skins or ask your local market sellers. So I also wanted to just show you today another one of my favorite guys, which is Mada. Now MDA is a root, and this is kind of what the roots look like. These aren't very mature roots, but they're from a plant that died that I had in my garden about a year ago. And it's the roots that contain this red color. So when you buy MDA, you might buy it as, like, a ground up kind of root or, like, in a fine powder like this, or you might buy an extract, as well. And it's all slightly different ways of working with the madder. You can put these into a nut sack to contain the pieces, the bits. The extract will just kind of dissolve into water. And ADA is mainly used for its kind of red, rich red color. Me, I personally prefer it for its peachy, pinky tones, and you'll want to check out the instructions from the place where you buy it to see what kind of percentage weight of fiber you'll need to obtain rich reds as opposed to kind of the lighter pinky peachy tones. Normally, you'll want quite a lot more weight of the dye per weight of fiber to get those rich reds. In my personal practice, the way I like to work with dies is just by obviously, I've got to know the dies over time so I can get a rough idea of how much I'll need to use. I know that some people really like to have specific amounts and quantities to work for specific colors, but that's where I'm going to encourage you to experiment and work with little samples and try out different weights with a certain dye that you're working with to see which colors with specific weights you can achieve. But today, I'm just going to work the way I like to work, which is with either a big handful of raw dye stuff, or I'm just going to take my powder of madder and put a big chunk into my nut milk bag as I know that I like the peachy, pinky tones of madder. I'm not worried about getting the red. So it's more for the deep reds that you want to be weighing out and measuring exactly how much madder you want. So, as you can see, these onion skins have come directly from the farm, so they're a little bit grubby, so I'm just going to give them a little rinse under the tap before I put them into my dye bath and cover them with water. So I have all of my samples here, and I'm just going to say that I've divided them up and added a little stitch to all my soy milk treated fibers and another little green stitch to all my alum sulfate, treated fibers, and the rest I've left with no stitch, so that's the acetate treated fibers just because if you're dyeing them all in one pot, it's going to be quite tricky to know which ones, which, if you don't label them. So we're starting with onion skins. I've given them rinse I'm just gonna pop them into my dipot. You want to choose a dipot that is big enough for your samples to move around in. And if you are the kind of person who likes to keep things a bit neater and tidier, maybe you'd want to put these into a bag to keep the bits from sticking to your fiber. This can also help with even dye uptake as well if you just want to be really, really meticulous. But when I'm working with onion skins meat, I just tend to plop them in, cover them in water. And sometimes I'll strain them and sometimes not. So there we have our onion skins. I'm just going to fill up with water just to cover the onion skins and then put them on a gentle heat and slowly extract the colour for about an hour. So I've just covered my onion skins. Just want to say, as well, the parts of the onion skins that you want to use is just the outer layer. You don't want to be using the bits that actually have onion flesh on them, otherwise, you'll have quite a stinky dye project. So I've just covered the onion skins. This is good for extracting. So I'll turn the heat on at a very low heat and just gently extract for over an hour, but also only covered because if you want to strain the onion skins after it's easier to take them out of a smaller amount of water than it is a bigger amount of water. And you can see, actually the colors already starting to extract slightly. This is one of the reasons I love onion skins so much is because the color just comes out so easily. So I'm using this ground up madder powder today, and I'm just going to film my little bag, which has gone really red from using it over and over again with madder. And I'm just gonna put a big old chunk in there. I see it's very dusty, so you might want to use a mask at this point as well. I've got a big old handful in fact, I might put. It looks like hot chocolate or cacao. I'm gonna put a couple more spoonfuls in there, just for good luck. One thing you'll notice when you start working with individual dies is that each die has a very, very distinct smell. So I just have my nut milk bag full of madder and I'm just going to attach it to the side of my dipod so that it doesn't kind of float around in the dipod and the bits come out the top of the bag. So again, your Mada will benefit from gentle, slow extraction. And if you have time, it's never a bad idea to let your dyes soak overnight and then reheat them again in the morning. You'll just get really the best out for your extraction if you can do that. But also, similarly, if you don't have time, you can just work like this. So I'll get this I'll let this extract for an hour or so very gently, and we'll see what the liquid looks like and if it's ready to die with them. A. So I'm just coming back to these gently steaming dipods that we've created, onion skins and madder, and they're both looking really good. So I'm gonna if you look at the madder, you can tell when it's doing good because it creates this yummy looking froth. Um, so I'm going to add some water into both of these dye baths. I'm not gonna strain my onion skins. I'm going to put my fabric straight in there. Another benefit of keeping your dye stuff in the die pot while you are dyeing is that it'll continue to extract, so more colour will keep releasing. But if you're going for a very, very, very unified color, then maybe you'll want to take the dye stuff out because it can affect the evenness of the dye. So just so you can see the two dye baths that are pretty much ready to put some cloth in. The onion skins, you'll see. There are still a few that could get a bit more extracted, but you'll see they'll kind of go a bit floppy and you can just see how amazing the deep that color is already. And then the madder, as well. It's got this beautiful pinky purple froth on top, and the water is a deep rich color. I'm just adding a bit of liquid to make sure that my fabric has some space to move around in. And these are all the samples that I've decided to dye with onion skins. So I'm just going to pop them in, you can see the orange now. See how orange it goes even after a couple of seconds. Now, again, you're putting damp fabric into your dipod and if you're going for a very even color, then you'll want to stir this and agitate this quite regularly. Once these are all in, I'm going to just return this to the heat and just simmer it gently for another hour or so. But really, you can keep checking. And when your fabric has the desired color, you can finish. So I've got my madder. I've added a bit extra liquid. Might have to add a little bit more, we'll see, but I'm going to put my mordanted fabric in there. Make sure to give it a good stir. Then we have this huge piece of hemp, which I'm going to do all in the madder. Yeah, I'll need to add a little bit more water in here. Well I haven't quite decided which color I want for the yarn yet. So I'm gonna think about that for a second, while I fill this up with some more water, and then I'm going to choose. So again, I will return this back to the heat and let it simmer for another hour or so or until the color is nice and saturated. You can see already, it's a beautiful peachy pink color. That's silk. And I have decided to put my wool into the onion skins. And this might be a really good example of why it might have been a good idea to strain my dye bath because I know that all those onion pieces are going to get stuck into my yarn, and it's gonna be a bit of a job to get them out. But that's the price I'm going to have to pay. Look at that color. Oh, my God. I love it. And again, remembering with the wool, you don't want to be agitating it too much, especially when you're applying heat. So this is the color of my fabric after about an hour of dyeing. I love it. This is exactly the kind of pink I love from MDA. You can see the silk has taken it differently. It's kind of almost red the silk, actually. Um, the hemp is very pink. So you could either at this point, leave it for longer overnight, making sure to stir it regularly, keeping all the fibers submerged under the water, or you can take it out now. As I'm happy with the colors now, I'm going to take it out now and just give it a rinse and then let it dry. One very interesting or good thing, nice thing about madder, is that it's great for using exhaust bath. So an exhaust bath is when you've dyed your first batch of fabric in the dye bath, but there's still a lot of color left. So you might want to try dyeing another piece of fabric at a lighter shade, but just using up all the leftover pigment. From the dithbth, and MDA is really great for this. And onion skins aren't bad either. So that's just something to bear in mind when you're working with your dyes. If you feel like there's still a lot of extra pigment leftover in the dye bath, you can go ahead and try dyeing something else for a lighter shape. Here's my onion skin dye bath, which I've been trying not to stir too much because of my wool that's in there. Obviously, ideally, if we were in an ideal world, I'd be dyeing these separately. Here you can see I've got my linen and Look at that. It's gone really, really orange where I'm not sure maybe I've spilt some mordant, or maybe it's been touching something some onion skins in the dye bath. That's actually, like, the color that is possible to achieve with onion skins. And otherwise, we've got this really nice pale orange. Um I've got some hemp, which has taken a color really nicely as well. Obviously, I've got lots of onion skins still stuck to my fabric and some silk. The colors just incredible. So when I'm happy with the colors, which I think I am now, I'm going to give them a rinse. Depending on the fiber, either I'll rinse it by hand, like the wool or I'll just give it a quick rinse in the washing machine for the cellulose fibers. So you've made it all the way through my course. I hope you've enjoyed it, and I've given you some inspiration. In the next chapter, we're just going to go over the results of all of the dyeing I've been doing in this course and talk about the fibers and how they've taken the dyes differently, just to give you an overview of what you can expect. 6. Bundle Dyeing: A playful technique using flowers and plants: So in this little bonus episode for my workshop, I'm just going to be showing you another technique you can use as a beginner to kind of play with natural dyes and get excited about the whole process. And it's called bundle dying. And bundle dying is just one of the most fun, most easy ways to get involved with natural dyes. You can use flowers. Your garden. You can go and forage some flowers. You can use dried flowers or dye stuff. It doesn't necessarily have to be flowers. It could be leaves, bark, tea bags, food waste from your kitchen, and you can get an amazing array of results with this technique. So, as always, I've got my samples. I've pre treated there damp. So it's important to work with a damp cloth, not wet but damp. Although having said that, if you want to work with a very wet cloth, you can get some very interesting results like that. But damp is great because and with bundle dyeing, we're working with steam. We've got our blank canvas. We're rolling up our dye stuff into our blank canvas, which is our fabric, and then we are putting it into a steamer, and it's the contact between the dye stuff and the fabric and the moisture from the steam that will kind of get the colors to transfer to the fibers. So I have all my little samples here. I'm mainly using, well, I am using my dried flowers today. Um, don't be afraid to try some roses. They work really well. Other flowers from your garden. Fresh marigolds. Fresh versions of all of these flowers will work great. Marigolds, oreopsis, cosmos. Seeds. So seeds will work great. And just like I really just want to encourage you to have fun with this. It's also a great, great, great technique to try with children because it kind of permits them to make a big mess, which I always think is fun. You can also use your extracts. So here I have cochine, which is a very, very strong pink color. Also, you can use your powder, so I have my madder here that we used earlier. And you can just get very, very creative. So I'm go to start with some scabiosaT is my cotton bandana that I'm using. I'm just going to you can put whole flowers, you can cut them up using scissors. You can just sprinkle the petals like this. You can go wild with a load of color or you can just be very delicate and sparing with your colors. I'm also actually going to try some of these little roots because I've had these for ages, they're my madder roots from the previous chapter. See what happens, maybe make some interesting patterns. Onion skins. Um, I'm gonna go for some orange onion skins, as well. Um. A little bit of chinny. It's very, very, very potent. A little goes a very long way. Got some tumeric there fresh. Just go to pop that. If you think about when you're bundle dying, as well, layering your colors or your patterns. Remember, they're like paints. So sometimes I get a bit of chimeric and I'll put it on my red onion skin, and it'll create a kind of very deep green almost and it'll make the oranges much more orange. Sometimes you get a nice surprise. Another way of saving your flowers is by freezing them. These are some frozen rose petals. I've had in my freezer for a very long time, so I'm just checking everything on here just to see what kind of results we can get. So now you've got a couple of options when you've got to this stage, you can just roll your fabric up like this. You can use a baton. I mean, if I was to use this one, I would have needed to fold the fabric over. So I would have just put my dye stuff on this side, but I'll show you with another piece for the stick or you can use. Once you've rolled them up, you can use an elastic band to secure them or string. So I'm just going to roll this up like this as tight as possible. O and then I'm gonna roll it into a little snail. And I'm gonna secure with an elastic band. I'm gonna move on to some soy treated. This is linen, I think. Do a little sprinkle. Mm hmm. I might just keep. If you have a lemon or some vinegar, you can also just give a little spray. As I mentioned before in the previous chapters, pH natural dyes are pH sensitive. So these with a bit of vinegar or lemon juice will go an even brighter pink. And with kind of baking soda or a higher pH, they'll go a kind of bluey green color. So that's really fun to play with as well. I'm going to put some rose petals on here. I think this is gonna be great. And I'm just gonna use my button. I'm gonna roll it up. Get my string. I'm just gonna roll down. You can see the roses already coming through. Roses are great. Red roses. Go. Nice and tight. There we go. If you're working with satin silk, make sure you're putting your dye stuff onto the kind of shiny side. I couldn't find my spray bottle, so I've just got a bit of vinegar here. I'm just sprinkling it around, hoping for some nice effects. And this one I'm just gonna squunch up like this. You can get creative with how you do your bundles. Doesn't have to be how everyone else does it. H. Could even just tie your fabric in a knot. So because I've got quite a few little samples left to do, I'm just going to do something fun, which sometimes I do when I have the same thing, a lot of the same thing to bundle dye. And I'll just sprinkle my fabric on the first layer, my dye stuff on the first layer. And then put the next layer on top. Sprinkle a bit on there. O. Can you do a bit of vinegar. Oops, you can see it goes almost orange. Add some madder my frozen roses. Add another layer. I'm just going with whatever I feel like checking on at the moment. M Mader. And the thing about these colors is that they'll all bleed through the layers and create some really interesting patterns and colors. Some will be stronger than others. Yeah. I'm just gonna use loads of roses. Again, a little sprinkle of vinegar. Perhaps. Look at these beautiful pink flowers. Got one more layer of silk. Which I'm gonna put like that. So I've just layered up loads of pieces of fabric, and I'm going to get a baton. So I have my button again, and I'm using a baton because I've got quite a few layers of fabric, and I just want to get it as tight as possible to make sure there's a lot of contact with the fabric. I can feel all the flowers crunching underneath. I love the way it kind of looks like a spring roll through the fabric. And then, again, I'm going to get another piece of fabric because I don't want the marks of the string to show on this one. So I've got this other piece of fabric which I use all the time for wrapping around the outside of my bundles. You can see how pretty it is. It's not even more danted this. It just building up the layers. And this extra layer will just protect the inside fabric from getting a mark from the string. Hopefully, sometimes I say things, and then it doesn't happen because actually this fabric does have some color on it, so we'll see. Let's tie these up. Well, we've got a few little bundles here ready to be steamed. So I'm just going to set up my steamer, which is a makeshift steamer. You don't have to have a real one. And the good thing about bundle dyeing is that you don't use much water. You just need enough water at the bottom of the pan for the steam to be created. Unlike immersion dying way, you need quite a lot of water. So you pop your colander in. You don't want your bundles to be touching the water, except if you want some interesting results, pop those in there. Lid on and then steam for about 20 to 30 minutes. Flowers like that tend to take less time than things like eucalyptus leaves or other leaves or barks or even onion skins. But things that are a bit more waxy tend to take a little bit more time, but flowers. Often, especially if you're working with silk, will be done in about 15 minutes. So it's important to take into consideration the fabric that you're working with. Obviously, if you've got thicker fabric, it's going to take a little bit more time as well to steam. But normally, when you steam, you can see the colors coming through and when they come through, then you know that it's done. So I'm just putting my bundle onto the heat, and that will steam now for maybe 15 minutes. So I'm just checking on my bundles. They've been steaming for about 5 minutes. You can see starting to get some color coming through there, but they're definitely not ready yet. Once you start to see a little bit of color, it's also a good idea to kind of get some tongues, don't use your hands, but to turn your bundles over just so you get an even distribution of the steam. So we're going to check on our bundles now. Remember that we're working with steam and you can see that it's really hot, a lot of steam coming off there, so I'm going to turn off the heat first and then be careful and open my pot. So it's looking like we're doing pretty good in there. I'm going to take these out. So normally, if you've got the patients, you could let these sit for a while before you unbundle them. But I know I don't have the patients, and I always like to open them straight away. Often, I think it's more psychological than actually real. Like, the results aren't necessarily better if you leave them for longer in this particular instance. But yeah, you can just if you want to have that extra surness that your colors are really absorbed into the fibers. But me, I like to open them straight away. They're hot, so be careful. Okay, so this is normally the moment where you'll discover if you are addicted to natural dyes or not. They're still quite hot, so you want to be careful when unwrapping them and be careful when you're unclipping the string or whatever you've used that you don't cut your fabric. All right. So interesting the way the cushiony has kind of gone black around the outsides, and it's got little pink dots in the middle. Oops. Oh, yes. Shake off all the flowers. You'll have some beautiful patterns. Get outside and the light. So remember with these ones, this was the outside piece of fabric. And then we layered them all, and these look like they're gonna be really cute. Can see the little madder roots made some little wormy patterns already. Let's see. This is you can see the roses have kind of left this kind of browny pinky color, which is quite interesting. And I think I'm going to use this sample to show you an example of what you can do with your pieces once you've bundle dyed them. This is a piece of linen, and it doesn't have a piece of string sewn in it, so it was mordanted with um acetate. Put that one there. Then we have recycled silk. I love the way the little der roots have created a pattern. We've got this last cotton bandana. Just really pretty. So all of this some di plants will still have some color left in them, and they can be reused. But most of this is spent now, and I'm just going to clear it up and put it in my compost, and it's great for re feeding your plants next year when your compost has decomposed. So here we have all of our samples. They've just come out of their steaming. So some of these are this one is hemp with alum acetate. This one is soy milk. Linen. This is alum acetate linen. Is it? Yes. And we've got some silk samples. This is a nice one. And you can get the idea. We've kind of got quite similar colors across all of them. But if you wanted to isolate, for example, scabiosa these petals, you could do so and just bundle die with them, or you could mix maybe scabiosa and some madder roots, or you could mix madder powder and just some marigold. Leaves. The possibilities are literally endless. And I'd just like to show you before we rinse these, there's an option right now that you can choose to try and that is to use ferrosulfate, which is an iron powder. And this will give you the option of changing and shifting the colors of your bundle dye. So ferrosulfate is a very interesting thing to have in your dye. Utensils. It's basically iron. So rust. You'll take a tiny little pinch. It's very strong. So it's also a mordant, as well. So if you do use ferrous sulfate, you can expect even longer lasting colors than you already have when you've treated them with the normal mordents. It's mostly used as a post mordent so after you've died. And it's very potent. So I'm going to choose a couple of samples. I think I'm going to choose this one and possibly this one. And I'm going to just make a solution of ferrous sulfate. I'm going to use my gloves because it is very strong, and your fingers will go black if you touch it. It's not considered toxic, except in very high quantities, because it's iron, we have that in our body anyway. But just be mindful when you're using it and keep it away from children and pets. So I'm going to get my vessel. It's very important to have just one vessel that you use for using iron because it can contaminate dipods and if you use it in your main dipod, then you might be getting results that are a little bit different than you wanted because iron will actually change the colors, and it will kind of sadden them, meaning that a lot of them will turn from, like, bright colors to kind of sadder colors, blues, grays, kind of green colors. And you'll see that now. So I'm just taking a small pinch. You really don't need much. And you can always add a little bit more if you feel like your colors aren't changing enough aren't shifting enough. So I'm just going to add some water to my vessel. I'm gonna take my chosen samples. So we're doing this at the stage where they've just come out of the they're steaming and they're still damp. We haven't rinsed them or anything. So what happens is, well, I'm going to put half of this in, I think, just to show you the contrast. The iron. React with the tannins in the dyes and shift their colors to that kind of more sad kind of color, saddened colors, but in the whole. Can you see they're starting to change and shift like they've gone kind of green there, whereas before they were more yellow. And once you're happy with the color shift, which I am already. So it happens quite quickly. I'm going to take them out, and then I'm going to go and rinse them. You can see very clear the color difference. From this side to this side, these yellow colors have kind of shifted to a dark green. The purples have gone a bit more bluey. I think that might have been an onion skin. It's really interesting and fun to play around with. You can experiment with this. And this is the other one. Now, this is one of the reasons I used a lot of roses in these samples because if you remember, this sample was quite pale, but roses for some reason, maybe it's the tannin content. They react really, really well with iron, and I just love the kind of effect you get. Often, you can even use white or yellow roses, and you won't have much color on your fabric when you take out the steamer. But after a Dunkin iron, it will just completely transform into something really spectacular. So I have all my samples here, and I'm just going to give them a quick rinse. They're still damp from the steaming. You could let them dry at this point. Sometimes I do like to let them dry and then give them a really hot steam iron just for, like, some extra heat fixing and then rinse them. But right now, I'm going to just rinse them now in some cool water. You don't want warm water and quite a lot of pH neutral soap. And I'm just using dish soap here. And you want quite a lot because the soap will kind of whip away the colors and hold onto the colors and stop them from bleeding into your other projects. And you'll see there's quite a lot of color coming off there. And you'll want to do this a couple of times, get rid of all the soap at one point, and then you let them dry. And then, like I just said, you can give them another steam iron just for an extra heat fixing step. And sometimes, if I'm working with bigger projects than this, I will rinse them in the washing machine, actually. So just in a short cycle, cold wash with plenty of pH neutral soap. I'm going to change this, rinse them again, and then I'll let them dry. So these are my results. After rinsing them, I'm just gonna air dry them, let them dry, and then give them a hot steam on. And then we'll go over the results in the next chapter. 7. Results & After Care: Caring for your naturally dyed textiles: So here we are at the end of our workshop. We've dyed with onion skins, madder root, and we've done some bundle dyeing, and we've also modented with three different things. So first of all, I'm going to take you through the samples of all the soy milk modented or soy milk treated pieces of fabric. And then I'm going to kind of show you the others and compare them so you can get an idea of all the different results you can get with each modent and different types of fabric. So all these have been treated with soy milk. And you can see that I'm still getting pretty good colour saturation, considering it's not a traditional or real inverted commerce mordant. We've got silks here, Linen. That's hemp, I think, or linen. Um, hemp, linen, more silk. I just want to show you, for example, here we've got soy milk treated silk, and here's the silk that's been treated with aluminum sulfate. And you can just see there's a slight difference. Aluminum sulfate, it's kind of a slightly richer, deeper red. This is quite different. The recycled silk samples. You can also see quite a difference with the silks that have been treated bundle dyed. So here we've got the satin silk two satin silks next to each other, and it's quite a difference in kind of color. Obviously, there will always be a difference because you're using different or I use different slightly different plant material and flowers. But you can still see that it's a little bit more intense the saturation. We've also got the recycled silk samples. You just see it's slightly more vibrant with the aluminum sulfate than the soy milk. Here we've got some linen, and I'm just going to compare this linen with the aluminum sulfate, woodented linen. I mean, I did use different flowers here, but you can just see it's slightly different, you know. I love the little wiggly worm shapes from the madder root. If you remember we put them in the bundles. So also let's do some hemp. And you can see that it's a bit pinker. It's just slightly different shades that you can expect using different modents. All these samples were modented with aluminum acetate. I just want to point out that there's some quirky little marks here that even though I was aiming for a solid color, it's just a good example of how sometimes natural dyes will just do what they want. You get little patches, which I think they're cute. This is hemp, and then some linen. Also, you'll notice that the saturation, the color shade of the madder on the cellular fibers is a much more light pink color than on the protein fibers, and that's just because of the affinity the protein fibers have for absorbing the color. So that's really interesting to note as well. And if you remember, we had this sample, which half of it I dunked in some ferrosulfate, and it just shifted the colors to a more kind of It saddens the colors, so you can see there the yellows become kind of more kind of green and blues. And this cotton bandana as well, I trotd with iron. It just kind of gives that. It's almost like a camouflage army colors. So this was my nice hank of wool, dyed with onion skins, and it came out really, really well. And it wasn't too difficult to pick out all the bits of onion skin. But you can see it's just a really gorgeous, vibrant orange. I also just wanted to show you another example of a silk I didn't dye. For this workshop. But just to show you that you can get a variety of patterns or colors with your bundle dying technique. So this was bundle dyed with Mada root and so this was dyed with Mada root and sumac, like fresh the flour from the sumac. So all these samples have been rinsed once. If I was going to use them for creating anything like garments or, you know, patchwork or something like that, I would just give them a wash just to be sure that everything, all the excess has been rinsed out. In terms of aftercare for your naturally dyed fibers, personally, I like to just wash them cool either by hand or on a gentle wash in the washing machine. You can even wash some silks in the washing machine, but you might want to do them by hand. Um, and wash them separately. You don't want to be washing them together because the colors could potentially bleed into something else. And you can use just any gentle pH neutral soap. So like I said before, natural dyes are pH sensitive. So if you have a harsh detergent, sometimes the pHs can be high or low, and that can just, like, change the colors of your dyes on your fibers. So just wash them as little as possible. And when you do wash them, dry them out of direct sunlight, just to preserve the colors for as long as possible. So just a couple of points about troubleshooting. If you're not getting the colors that you are aiming for, there's a few things you can think about. Like I said, throughout the workshop, maybe the water, the pH of your water. Like you can think about where you're getting it from, whether it's rain water or tap water. If you're going for a solid color, it's really important to agitate or, like, stir regularly your mordants, your scouring and your dye baths. Sometimes, like I said before, the dyes just have a mind of their own. I really have no idea why this sample has this kind of cool pattern on there. It wasn't what I was going for, but it did happen in the die pods. So as we dying at home, it's a little bit trickier to get even colors than if we were doing it in a kind of industrial setting. You can also think about the temperature that you're creating your dye baths and just play around really I really want to encourage you with this course to kind of experiment and try out things. And I almost would encourage failing because it is when you fail or have a perceived failure that you will learn the most, especially about natural dyes, and it will inform your next decision on how you create your next eyebth and um, yeah, it's really, really helpful, in fact. Disposing of your mordant baths and your dye baths. Most dye baths can be used to water your gardens. Maybe I wouldn't use them to water my vegetables, but definitely like, outside the outdoor plants that you have in your gardens. As for disposing of mordant baths, you can reuse the modent baths, just to use up some of the excess mordant in there, as I said before in the workshop. Or you can pour when you finish with them, you can pour them down the drains the municipal drains. So like down the toilet or a dirty drain, but not avoid pouring them down your sink or anywhere that you are preparing food. It's worth checking out the guidelines from your local government, whether it's considered toxic waste or not. And just to check that you are allowed to pour them down your drains. You also don't want to be pouring them in any rivers or lakes or anything like that because they can be harmful to aquatic life. So pouring them down the drain means that they'll be treated by the municipal system and cleaned like that. So that's when you're working from home and doing small amounts of dying, that is okay to do. So congratulations for finishing the workshop. I hope that you found it inspiring and feel motivated to go and try some natural dying on your own. If you have any questions at all, you can ask me via Skillshare or via my website or via my Instagram, and I'll be happy to help you with any questions that you have.