The art of making natural dyes

On a recent visit to Dja Dja Wurrung country I met with Ilka White, a Castlemaine-based artist shares her passion for natural dyeing. What began as a childhood love of foraging and making backyard potions led to studies in weaving and a long-lasting fascination for textiles and traditional making methods.

Natural dyeing has been around for thousands of years. Plants, minerals and insects have been used to dye fabric in almost every corner of the globe. Australia, with our longest living culture, has a rich fibre and textile history of First Nations peoples digging roots and gathering bark and berries to extract natural colours to dye fibres. An impressive variety of colours can be extracted from leaves, flowers, bark, roots, tubers and fruits, as well as minerals and even beetles.

Resources at hand

Ilka’s introductory workshops show people how simple the process can be. Many dye materials can be foraged, from kitchen scraps to local weeds such as oxalis, offering a wide variety of hues. Even the mordant (the substance used to bond dyes onto a material) can be made from collecting what’s to hand, such as rusty iron or corroding copper pipe.

To make a simple iron mordant, take some pieces of rusting iron like old bolts or horseshoes, put them in a jar and cover with a mix of one-third vinegar to two-thirds water. Let this sit for a couple of weeks or until the liquid changes colour and then use. Some plant dyes require the dye bath to have a specific acidity or alkalinity. An acid modifier such as lemon juice, or alkaline modifier like wood ash, are commonly used to change the bath’s pH. Modifiers can extend the range of tones a plant will give or even change the colour completely.

Tips for beginners

Natural dyes work beautifully with natural fibres but not so for synthetic fibres. For beginners, protein-based animal fibres such as wool or silk are preferred choices to cellulose-based plant fibres like cotton and linen.

All fabrics are required to be clean from oils and dirt, so they readily take up the dye. Once the fibre is prepared, it’s time to extract the dye from your plants. If you’re a beginner to the process, Ilka recommends starting out using onion skins as they require no additional ingredients and will produce reliable results. Brown onion skins often produce yellow and orange tones while red onions give warm wine through to olive-green colours. Each batch can vary due to a variety of factors, such as the hardness of water, the freshness of the materials, the mordants used and the fibres being dyed.

Some common examples of dye materials that can be foraged in your own backyard are eucalyptus leaves for a range of colours including deep ochres, avocado skins and pips for soft salmon pinks and Dyer’s chamomile, coreopsis, tansy or oxalis flowers for lemon yellows. One of Ilka’s personal favourites, the native hibiscus mixed with alum, produces wonderful fresh green hues.

The plant materials are simmered or boiled and the water is strained off to use as the dye bath. The pre-wetted fabric is then immersed into the dye bath with the mordant added, brought to and held at a simmer, then rinsed until the water runs clear and the cloth is hung to dry.

Additional techniques that clamp, bind, fold, or wrap fabric to resist the dye’s penetration offer endless pattern variations. Traditional Japanese tie-dye methods such as these are called shibori, which comes from the Japanese root word shiboru, meaning to wring, squeeze or bind.

A sense of place

There is something intrinsically special about using plants to dye your own fabric. Ilka’s work often responds to the spirit of a place and the forces within the natural world. She has found the concentrated earthy colours of her central Victorian dye pots are a strong contrast to the exquisitely subtle hues produced from her previous home near Melbourne’s Merri Creek. Creating your own fabrics from foraging to dyeing and then spinning or weaving the resulting colours, stimulates a profound curiosity and respect for the materials and for the process itself.

Written by Kerry Reber, Diggers Education and Events Manager.