By Heather N. Kolich, County Extension Coordinator, UGA Extension Forsyth County, October 2022
Plants are amazingly versatile and useful. Of course, plants give us food, or, as some people quip, plants provide food for our food. Plants also provide shade over our heads, a soft surface under our feet, and with a little ingenuity, they give so much more.
Humans learned thousands of years ago how to weave grasses and vines into baskets and vessels, how to twist the inner bark of trees into rope and string, and how to beat these bark fibers to make cloth. Later, people separated fibers from flax stalks and wove them together to make linen, and spun the fibers of cotton bolls into thread for weaving cloth.
All of these manufactured items are useful and essential for human survival and comfort, but how dull they are without color. Fortunately, plants can provide that, too.
Of course, we’ve all experienced accidental color additions to clothing from plant products such as tomato ketchup, blackberry jam, mustard. Perhaps food stains inspired ancient peoples to experiment with plants to create colors for paints, fibers, and clothing. For hunters and gatherers, however, food would be too valuable to use for aesthetics. Fortunately, there are lots of plants and plant parts that are inedible but make beautiful colors.
Plants, minerals, and other gifts of nature continued to be sources of dye until the mid-1800s. Master dyers kept recipe books for making colors from nuts, flowers, roots, and leaves of plants. Acorns and walnuts yield browns and grays. Marigold, dandelion, and goldenrod flowers, as well as roots and leaves from other plants and certain lichens, create shades of yellow from butter to gold. The inedible berries of pokeweed make pink and purple deep enough to use for ink. Reds can be drawn from madder root and bloodroot.
Fibers must be prepared to take up color before they go into the dye vat. This process is called mordanting. It involves soaking the yarn or fabric for several hours in water treated with a mordant such as alum. The hue and saturation of color may be affected by the mordant, as well as the type of fiber in the yarn or fabric to be dyed. Protein fibers, such as wool and silk, and the cellulose fibers of cotton and linen will react differently to the plant pigments in the dye. Experienced dyers also kept records and fabric samples of these reactions.
If you’re curious about making natural dyes and the dyeing process, Forsyth County Extension is offering a Natural Plant Dyeing Make & Take Workshop on Friday, October 21, 2022. Our staff has been harvesting native plant material for the past few weeks to prepare for this fun, hands-on afternoon. Rest assured that we harvested sustainably, making certain to leave plenty of berries and flowers for the birds and bees. See the information on page 6 to register and try your hand at dyeing clothing.