Playing with Natural Dyes
Sometimes, you want your white shirts to be a bit less white, right ? To add a bit of colors in this grey World !
But how ?
Hey, did you know that there are natural dyestuff all around us everywhere all the time ?
Avocado pits gives you Pink, Turmeric gives you the most beautiful Yellow you've ever seen, Onion skins gives you some soft, light brown. Just to cite 3 easy ones to find in your kitchen.
But there's a lot more of those in nature too - that's kind of how humans made colors for millennia, actually.
So, we decided to try with some Alder cones, given that we were in Lietuva, and since they have something going on with trees & forests & nature & all this.
It's supposed to give some shade of Brown of some sort. Exciting !
The idea is to collect only the ones that fell on the ground so not to hurt the trees.
Half an hour in the right spot and we got what we thought would be enough.
To the kitchen !
To give it a bit of texture, we tied our boring colorless shirt before immersing it in the dye.
We are not using any mordant to fixate the colors, so let's see how it goes.
It will have to stay there for a couple of hours, heated gently without boiling.
Following some guide we found online, we put the cones to soak overnight, then slowly heated them on low fire for a couple of hours to liberate all their dyestuff !
Aaand here's the result !
A beautiful & non-boring Dark Caramel shirt !
Using basically only Alder cones and a bit of water.
Amazing, no ?
Let's see if we can make some other exciting colors in the future !
