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Guide for Plant Based Textile Dyes

You can find this Plant Based Dyes Infographic here.

You can use these natural ingredients to dye fabrics:

Onions skins, holy basil, turmeric, indigo

some lichens, some barks, some seeds, eucalyptus leaves

bloodwood kino, logwood, avocado seeds, sunflower seed hulls

teas, coffees, some roots, acorns, oak galls, pomegranate rind

marigolds, annatto, saffron, butterfly bush, banksia cones

bamboo, cherries, elderberry, madder root, grape skins

rosehips, strawberries, purple sage, blackberries, blueberries

cornflowers, hyacinth, olives, red cabbage, ornamental plum leaves

artichokes, hydrangea flowers, calendula, camellia, chamomile

moringa leaves and bark, lilac flower, nettles, rosemary, spinach

rosella roots, lentils, dandelion, fennel, iris, bay leaves, crocus, daffodil, paprika, weld 

How Do You Use Natural Dyes on Fabric?

Step-by-Step How to Dye Fabric from my post here:

Pre-wash and pre-soak your fabric.  It is best to use 100% natural fabrics that are undyed.  I have recently fallen in love with China silk habotai because it’s elegant and billowy without the price pitfall of crepe de chine.

Chop up your food source into little tiny bits (but not so tiny that they can’t be strained out).  For onions and plums, use only the skins

Prepare the water base in a large pot: add the water in a 2:1 ratio of water to food source (so if you have 2 cups of chopped bits, add 4 cups of water)

Boil the mixture for approximately an hour

Strain out food source and return liquid dye to pot

Add salt or vinegar, depending on the food source, to the water and mix.  For fruits and vegetables, add ½ cup of salt to every 8 cups of water.  For plant material, add 1 part vinegar to 4 parts water).  Salt and vinegar act as fixatives for the dye.

Add your pre-soaked fabric to the dye, stirring thoroughly, and bring up to a boil

Depending on how dark you would like the dyed fabric to be, boil your fabric in the dye for any length of time up to about an hour and a half.  At that point, your dye is probably exhausted.

Hand wash your fabric in cold water and organic detergent at least twice to ensure that all of the dye and fixative are out of the fabric, rinse, and hang dry or lay flat.

**if you would like a lighter color, either add less fixative (vinegar or salt) or boil for less time – or a little of both!  You can also add some salt/vinegar to the pre-soak water, but I haven’t really seen a difference with doing so.

I also posted this infographic from Design Sponge here.

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Somewhere in northern Italy

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classically trained but we’ll still fuck ya up

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You realize you’ve misheard your daughter. There’s actually a mobster under her bed.

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I keep trying to force myself to speak of the things that remain mute inside.

Anne Sexton (via quotemadness)

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The narcissist cruises through his life as a tourist would through an exotic island. He observes events and people, his own experiences and loved ones – as a spectator would a movie that at times is mildly exciting and at others mildly boring. He is never fully there, entirely present, irreversibly committed. He is constantly with one hand on his emotional escape hatch, ready to bail out, to absent himself, to re-invent his life in another place, with other people. The narcissist is a coward, terrified of his True Self and protective of the deceit that is his new existence. He feels no pain. He feels no love. He feels no life.

Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self Love (via poeticsofdeath)

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Winona Ryder

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hawkeye (2012 - 2015) matt fraction, david aja, matt hollingsworth

“it’s okay, everybody. it’s okay, i’m an avenger…” “…are you, like, iron fist or something?”

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goldfish bowl

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He is gone

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National geographic

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Iron and Wine - Such great Heights 

I am thinking it’s a sign

That the freckles in our eyes

Are mirror images and when we kiss

They’re perfectly aligned