Natural Kitchen Dyes: Make Your Own Dyes from Fruit, Vegetables, Herbs and Tea, Plus 12 Eco-Friendly Craft Projects

By Alicia Hall

“Hall digs into kitchen chemistry in this cozy guide to using plants to make dyes . . . This fun collection will be a valuable addition to any DIY library.” —Publishers Weekly
 
With Natural Kitchen Dyes you can explore the magical world of natural dyes, without the need of a garden full of dye plants. Our kitchens are a great source of natural dye colors, from vegetable peels that create blush pinks and peaches, fruit skins that make lemon yellows, a green dye sourced from carrot tops, dried spices, and used tea bags to create vibrant yellows, rich terracottas, and deep browns. Natural Kitchen Dyes takes you through the exciting process of creating these wonderful natural colors, dyeing fabric with the dyes, and suggests ingenious ways to get your hands on some natural dye sources. Accompanying the natural dye recipes in the book are ten environmentally conscious projects, which have been created not only to show off the natural dyes beautifully, but to help eliminate waste. Several of the projects actually utilise waste that would otherwise be composted or recycled such as old clothes turned into bags and patchwork floor cushions, to dried pulses past their expiration date used to make a beaded necklace.
 
“This is my sort of book: no need to start your adventure with a shopping expedition for ingredients—at least not to begin with—it’s all there in the kitchen for a safe, spur-of-the-moment indulgence.” —The Journal for Weavers, Spinners & Dyers
 
“Hall outlines a kid-friendly craft that just might engage adults too.” —Booklist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526793102

Alicia Hall

After discovering plant dyeing in a horticultural book while working as a gardener, Alicia drew on her education in fashion design to experiment with plant dyes and textiles, creating colorful dyes using the plants that grew in the gardens that she worked in. Since growing her passion into a thriving small business, Alicia now spends her time cooking up plant dyes and making textile products in her home studio in the heart of the Wiltshire countryside, where she lives with her husband and son.

Book preview

introduction

Ever since I first discovered natural dyes and experimented with making dyes from carrot tops, this book idea has been in my head.

Creating colours from what nature offers us has been passion of mine for a long time. By focusing specifically on dyes that can be made from ingredients that are easily found in our kitchens (or at the very least just require a quick visit to the supermarket), I want to share this passion with you. I hope this will mean making natural dyes is more accessible to those people who don’t have access to a garden in which to grow dye plants (or the enthusiasm to grow them), those that don’t have the time or inclination to go foraging for plants in the wild, or those who aren’t physically able to. I hope it will also make creating natural dyes something that foodies, who feel at home in the kitchen, will embrace. It’s a wonderful way to experiment with food and drink in a new way. Whatever brings you to this book, I hope it will inspire you to have fun and create something new from things you will find in your kitchen.

chapter one: collecting

Although this book is about making natural dyes from ingredients you can easily find in your kitchen, you may find some of the food stuffs I suggest are foods you rarely or never eat. There may also be ingredients you don’t regularly eat enough of to collect the large quantities you will need to produce vibrant colours. In this chapter, I’ve suggested a few alternative ways to get hold of natural dye sources in addition to detailing the best way of storing them.

SAVE AS YOU COOK

The easiest way to collect natural dye sources is to put them to one side as you are preparing a meal. You can do this gradually over time and, as long as your ingredients are washed and stored properly (more on the best way to store each natural dye source in the Recipes chapter), they will remain good to use until you have enough to make a dye.

KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR BIG PRICE REDUCTIONS IN THE SHOPS

A great way to collect natural dye sources is to buy reduced items which are a bit bruised or near their best before date. Lots of the fresh food stuffs you can use for dyes can be frozen until you are ready to use them.

CHECK YOUR CUPBOARDS

Regularly check your cupboards for items that are past their best; these items can still be used for making a dye. In fact, I think it’s much more environmentally friendly to dye with food items that are past their best, than use food that could still be safely eaten. Dried goods can be put to one side and reserved for natural dyeing and fresh food, that is past its best, can be frozen.

ASK CAFÉS

If you ask nicely, local cafés will usually be very happy to save their food waste scraps for you. Ask them for avocado skins, avocado stones, onion and pomegranate skins. Depending on the size of the café, you may only have to wait a few days before you to have enough scraps to make a dye with.

GET FRIENDS AND FAMILY INVOLVED

A good option is to ask friends and family to save you their food scraps, old tea bags and out of date dried goods. If you don’t see them regularly, ask them to store them in the freezer for you – otherwise much of it may be unsuitable to make a dye from by the time you are able to collect it! If you are using used tea bags for dyeing, you need double the amount listed in this book. This is because when you make a cup of tea, much of the dye pigment is lost.

GARDENS, FARMS AND ALLOTMENTS

Small independent vegetable growers and market gardeners may be able to donate some of their waste (especially things such as carrot tops) to you.

SUPERMARKETS

You can very often find items like loose onion skins in the bottom of the onion container in supermarkets. Ask if you can collect them and take them home to save for dyeing.

chapter two: fabrics

The choice of fabrics available can sometimes feel overwhelming, so in this chapter I share some of the fabrics that I like to work with most frequently when dyeing with natural dyes. You can brew up a beautiful pot of gorgeous coloured dye but if you apply it to the wrong fabric the colour won’t look as vibrant or intense as you had hoped. Here you will learn about different types of fabric and which work best with natural dyes.

Wool dyes well with natural dye producing great results with a beautiful and rich depth of colour.

When it comes to working with natural dyes, choosing the right fabric to work with is really important. Alongside preparing the fabric correctly, I’d even go as far as to say that choosing the right fabric is the most important choice you will make when it comes to creating or crafting something using natural dyes. You can brew up a beautiful pot of dye – perhaps a gorgeous chartreuse green from carrot tops or a deep shade of orange from onion skins – but if the dye is applied to the wrong fabric the colour won’t look as vibrant or as intense as you had envisaged. The wrong choice of fabric can sometimes even result in a completely different colour than you expected.

My number one rule when choosing which fabrics to use with natural dyes is to always choose a natural fabric. Fabrics are generally grouped into three categories: natural, synthetic and semi-synthetic. Natural fabrics can be further split into two groups: those that are made from protein fibres (derived from animals) and those that are made from cellulose fibres (derived from plants).

NATURAL FABRICS

Protein fabrics will take up natural dyes differently to cellulose fabrics, with the colour results on protein fabrics often being more intense and vibrant. I use soya milk to treat cellulose fabrics before I dye them with natural dyes, however, even after this process, protein fabrics will still yield a slightly better colour result than a cellulose fabric.

SEMI-SYNTHETIC FABRICS

This type of fabric is manufactured using chemical processes to turn naturally occurring fibres into a fabric. Because of this process, these types of fabrics will still absorb natural dyes to some degree, but not nearly as well as 100% natural fabrics will.

SYNTHETIC FABRICS

Synthetic fabrics such as polyester, acrylic, nylon and neoprene will never dye well as they are designed not to absorb moisture (this is why synthetic fabrics are often used for sports and performance wear). This means they won’t absorb a natural dye well. If you do try to dye synthetic fabrics they may look like they have absorbed some colour whilst they are in the dye pot, but the majority, if not all, of the colour will disappear in the wash. An easy way to check if a fabric is synthetic or not is to burn a small piece of it. If it is synthetic it will melt and release a chemical smell.

As a side note, it is now commonly understood that synthetic fabrics have a negative impact on the environment in terms of the air and water pollution they create during their manufacture, washing and their eventual disposal. Synthetic

Reviews for Natural Kitchen Dyes

[dokfintong · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I think you can do much better with a different book. This one seems to be thrown together without much editorial oversight or consultation with a dye chemist. The organization of the text could be greatly improved, as could the discussion of dye chemistry. It is clear that Alicia Hall doesn't know much about silk. The recipes here are for tiny lengths of fabric. Most of the projects are not attractive.First about the silk. I happen to know a lot about silk, having traded in it for a very long time, and I know some very famous professional silk weavers. I also know people who teach natural dying and who use natural dyes on silk and other fibres in their artwork. So my sources are very good.On page 24 (of the ARC) we read that raw silk is created by allowing the silkworm to break its way out of its silk cocoon naturally and that raw silk is rough and textured surface created by the silk fibres breaking as the silkworm escapes.This is completely wrong, although you might be able to see where the misinformation comes from. Do a web search "what is raw silk". When I did it the other day (but not today) the very first entry gave that false info, followed by other entries that correctly identify raw silk as silk that has not been treated to remove sericin, the gummy protein that holds the cocoon together while the silkworm pupates. Silk from ruptured cocoons is something else entirely. And all silk is lustrous including raw silk, although the luster is different.Sericin is removed by washing in soap, and the artist decides which soap to use and how much sericin to remove. Fibres with more sericin are thicker and the silk woven from them is slightly coarser, but not necessarily more slubby. Artists may sometimes want uneven texture and will handle the fibres accordingly. Fibres with more sericin take up dye differently from well-cleaned fibres. Different strains of silkmoth produce longer or shorter fibres for their cocoons. When the fibres are short, more of them must be twisted together to make yarn and the resulting yarn is thicker and more textured as each of the end overlaps is a thick spot with two ends tucked in somewhere.Ms Hall writes of silk and wool as being delicate fabrics. Silk is not particularly delicate. It is boiled during production and plain silk fabric is unaffected by heat. You can wash and dry it by machine to make it wonderfully soft. Linings, art from special loom techniques, embroidery, and various colorations, though, may not be sturdy and must be protected.Wool fibres have cuticle, not follicles (p 56). Follicles are part of the sheep's skin.Beetroot is listed in several places as a fugitive color but also on page 44 as a pH sensitive anthocyanin dye, which, in theory, should be colorfast. Beetroot is perhaps a fugitive pH sensitive anthocyanin color but it is not clear from the text. The discussion of anthocyanin and pH sensitive dye is insufficient.I find most of the projects distressingly ugly.There is better info than this online and there are better books to be had. Don't bother with this one.I received a review copy of "Natural Kitchen Dyes" by Alicia Hall from Pen and Sword through NetGalley.com.

[cathygeha · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Natural Kitchen Dyes by Alicia HallMake Your Own Dyes from Fruit, Vegetables, Herbs and Tea, Plus 12 Eco-Friendly Craft ProjectsI remember dying a long white skirt and top when living in Jordan. I didn’t know then that one needs to set the dye so it eventually faded back to white. If I had been able to refer to this book back then the skirt, now long gone, would not have faded back to white…probably. The chapters in the book”* Introduction* Collecting (what and how to collect and store natural ingredients to use for dyes)* Fabrics (natural are recommended with specifics included)* Tools* Soya Milk (I know…wondered about this as it is hard to find to buy locally…interesting what it is used for)* Color Fast, Fugitive, and PH Sensitive colors* Dye Basics* Dye Recipes* Ink and Printing* Modifiers* Other Dyes* Gift Wrap* Projects (12 of them)The colors are much softer looking than the brighter ones often found in fabrics we buy in shops. I found a few that might work for me and do have a white linen shirt I could try a dye out on in the future. We will see. I believe that dying might be interesting and this book would assist if one were going to use natural dyes. Thank you to NetGalley and Pen & Sword – White Owl for the ARC – This is my honest review. 4-5 Stars