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Got my research hat on today for the latest blog post about the correlation between yellow dye-producing plants and their medical qualities, in both traditional/historic medicine and contemporary medical practices. The blog appears on 80dyes.com so hop on over there or click: https://80dyes.com/f/dye-and-medicine
Turmeric - Feb. 2025
Turmeric - Feb. 2025
Turmeric - Feb. 2025
This ground spice produces a bright yellow on any natural fabric regardless of fiber content or the type of mordant used. It is reported to have limited color-fastness, but I have turmeric-dyed fabrics from almost a decade ago that remain vividly colored.
Bright Yellow
Turmeric - Feb. 2025
Turmeric - Feb. 2025
Cotton, linen, silk, hemp all end up vibrantly yellow after some time in a turmeric pot. The ground dye sticks to everthing, so I steep it in the dye pot using a thin cotton bag that is removed before adding the fabric. The dye bag can be re-used a couple times and still produce a bright yellow.
An Ancient Spice
Turmeric - Feb. 2025
An Ancient Spice
Whole turmeric looks much like ginger root and the two often are sold together in markets around North Africa, Asia, the Middle East and across the Himalaya. It adds the signature flavor to many iconic dishes and has been used for centuries to dye fabric for Buddhist monks' robes.
Aster Family Flowers - Jan. 2025
Aster Family Flowers - Jan. 2025
Aster Family Flowers - Jan. 2025
New seed catalogs have me thinking of new plants and thus clearing out those dried last summer. This dye pot surprised me. I loaded it up with dried mixed flowers in the aster family: rudbeckia, coneflowers, small sunflowers, blanket flower. I've never been able to get more than a barely there yellow or sickly thin green from any of them, but maybe the combination lifted them all.
Everyone Into the Pot
Aster Family Flowers - Jan. 2025
Aster Family Flowers - Jan. 2025
These flowers , dried from the past summer's crop, went into the dye bath. Clockwise from top left: Prairie Sunflower, Yellow Coneflower (also known as Echineca), Blanket Flower and Black-Eyed Susan (also known as Rudbeckia).
Tan to Yellow to Gold
Aster Family Flowers - Jan. 2025
Overdyeing - Jan. 2025
Hemp fabrics and some cottons mordanted with aluminum acetate picked up a lot of gold color while others, including cottons using a soy binder, turned a softer, lighter yellow or tan. All were dyed in the same bath at 160 degrees F and with a pH 8.
Overdyeing - Jan. 2025
Embracing the Dark Side
Overdyeing - Jan. 2025
Many yellow dye sources such as barks are loaded in tannin, giving them a secondary use in the mordanting process. For flower-based dyes, another use is as a base for overdyeing to create new colors or brighten others. In this photo, the vivid yellow from weld is in the center. On the left, it had been dipped in a madder exhaust to create an apricot-orange. On the right, it's overdyed with concentrated cochineal to brighten up a pink.
Getting Green
Embracing the Dark Side
Embracing the Dark Side
A classic weld overdye combination is to dip the yellow fabric in indigo to create a range of greens. The intensity and fastness of the bright yellow from weld holds up to the deep blue indigo to create a greens that vary depending on the number of indigo dips.
Embracing the Dark Side
Embracing the Dark Side
Embracing the Dark Side
Changing the dye pot pH or adding iron can create grays, browns and khaki-green colors from yellow plant dyes. The two soft gray-green tones came from adding just a bit of rusty water to a weld dye bath. The dark gray is from adding iron oxide. The brown is what happens when both the pH and temperature of the dye bath are increased. All fabrics in these images are cotton.
Onion Skin - Jan. 2025
Dyeing with onion skins, the papery outer layer of yellow or red onions, is a great way to use kitchen waste for a better purpose than right in the trash. Collect them in a bag as you cook and either freeze or dry them until ready to dye.
A Little Goes a Long Way
Just a handful of onion skins can produce a range of yellows and golds. Scrunched up in bundle dyeing they create a brightly colored camo-type print. Cut into small heart or star shapes and steamed onto fabric makes for fun prints.
Golds Galore
Weld - Jan. 2025
To simmer or not to simmer? Scrunch up the fabric or stir frequently? Increase the pH? Lower it? Dozens of ways exist to manipulate the onion skin color from a soft light peachy yellow to deep rich gold.
Weld - Jan. 2025
A Long Dye History
Weld - Jan. 2025
I'm starting 2025 by moving on to weld, the queen of yellow natural dyes. Colors on the right of image = various fabrics (cottons, hemp, silks) and different mordants with and without tannins. WOF at 100% of dried flowers, leaves and stems. Far left in image = results from an overnight soak in the exhaust bath. Yellow is a given with weld, so the next move is to see how I can manipulate it into other colors.
A Long Dye History
A Long Dye History
A Long Dye History
Weld grows in temperate climates around the globe and has been used as a dye since pre-history. It produces light-fast vibrant colors that also play well with others, especially indigo to create greens.
Rabbitbrush - Dec. 2024
Rabbitbrush - Dec. 2024
Rabbitbrush - Dec. 2024
Rabbitbrush, a large relative of goldenrod, produces colors ranging from bright yellow to softer yellows, gold, light orange and a khaki green as the color is shifted with pH or WOF changes and after-baths.
Harvest Time Matters
Rabbitbrush - Dec. 2024
Rabbitbrush - Dec. 2024
The depth of color produced by rabbitbrush can be very bright when harvested at its peak or light yellow later in the season as the flowering parts fade. I foraged it along roadsides at both times, used it fresh but also dried a lot and used it later to achieve different shades of yellow.
Enhancing Prints
Rabbitbrush - Dec. 2024
I had several leaf-printing failures where the prints were barely visible, so I tried using an overdye of rabbitbrush. It brought out the depth of the prints in a pretty nice way. The tannin in the oak leaves kept the fabric brown instead of rabbitbrush yellow.
Moving on to Marigold - Oct. 2024
Moving on to Marigold - Oct. 2024
Marigold comes in dozens of varieties and grows just about everywhere. In our semi-arid Colorado climate, the dead flowers dry out instead of rotting and can still create dye color well into winter. I found no difference in the color from the small flowers or large African marigold blooms other than the amount of blossoms needed.
Fresh, Dried, Frozen
Moving on to Marigold - Oct. 2024
Fresh, Dried, Frozen
There are many ways to use the marigold flower as a dye source: fresh, frozen, dried, with the sepal (green part connecting the flower to the stem) or without it and just using the petals. The seeds of dried blossoms will add a brown to botanical printing but seem to have no effect on dye color.
Go For Gold
Moving on to Marigold - Oct. 2024
Fresh, Dried, Frozen
Marigold is a reliable yellow-producer but also easy to push toward gold and brown with changes in pH or heat. Boiling any flower will change the color toward brown. To retain a brighter color, keep the heat just below a simmer, around 160 degrees Fahrenheit.
Coreopsis - Oct. 2024
Finally - a Solid Coreopsis Yellow
Finally - a Solid Coreopsis Yellow
I spent a month trying to move coreopsis away from orange and into yellow. So many factors affect the natural dye processes that much of it becomes trial and error using a variety of fabric and mordants.
Finally - a Solid Coreopsis Yellow
Finally - a Solid Coreopsis Yellow
Finally - a Solid Coreopsis Yellow
I saved and dried flowers from a previous pot and reused them at 50% WOF (weight of fabric) in 3 quarts of tap water with a pH of 7. Soaked for 2 hours, heated for a half hour without straining. A little vinegar brought the pH down to 5. Cotton and silk fabric were left to cool and soak in the pot overnight.
Low pH
Finally - a Solid Coreopsis Yellow
Coreopsis - Sept. 2024
The cotton and silk came out of the pot a vibrant medium yellow and dried only slightly lighter. A few tiny orange spots showed up from some direct contact with the flower petals still in the dye bath. The sweet spot for coreopsis yellow seems to be a low pH and low WOF.
Coreopsis - Sept. 2024
Coreopsis - Sept. 2024
Coreopsis - Sept. 2024
Coreopsis basalis is one of several varieties of the flower that produces fabric and fiber dyes ranging from bright orange to deep yellow. It was my starter flower for The Yellow Project because of its dependable dye production. It also is a standard for printing or pounding on fabric.
Manipulating Color
Coreopsis - Sept. 2024
Manipulating Color
Coreopsis flowers can create a variety of colors. This image, from left, shows orange hues from the addition of soda ash to increase the dye bath pH, and yellows made by the addition of citric acid or vinegar to lower the pH.
Taking Notes
Coreopsis - Sept. 2024
Manipulating Color
Careful measurements and detailed note-taking are crucial in natural dye color manipulation. A difference in the weight of fabric vs. weight of dye source, the water pH, heat levels and additives all influence the resulting color. These pages showed how coreopsis will produce color even after using the pot four times.
Yellow-Dyed Quilted Art
Mixed Aster Family Flowers
Mixed Aster Family Flowers
Mixed Aster Family Flowers
This was fun and easy: I found the embroidered bouquet of rudbeckia (black-eyed Susan) at a thrift shop and decided to surround it with simple-shaped fabrics (cotton, linen and a hemp-silk blend). All fabrics were dyed with a mix of dried aster family flowers left from the past summer (rudbeckia, prairie sunflower, coneflower, blanket flower.
Simple Hand Quilting
Mixed Aster Family Flowers
Mixed Aster Family Flowers
The hand quilting with yellow-dyed cotton thread kept to simple shapes - crosshatch, parallel lines and a cable look in the outer border.
The Weld Quilt
The Coreopsis Quilt
The Coreopsis Quilt
All of these colors were produced by using weld, an ancient dye source found across temperate climates and in use as far back as the Iron Age. Weld is one of the most light-fast and durable yellow dyes. A quick swim in madder produces oranges, pinks and browns on weld. With Indigo, weld makes a solid true green. This quilt is made from cottons, linen and hemp blends. Hand quilted as always.
The Coreopsis Quilt
The Coreopsis Quilt
The Coreopsis Quilt
I'm pretty sure 1,000 yellow flowers died to dye this quilt. All of the colors and prints are from my experiments with coreopsis. Cottons, linen, raw and processed silk fabrics. Solid blocks are mixed with 'crumb quilt' blocks in a variety of coreopsis dyes and prints. Machine pieced and hand quilted. One of the beauties of natural dyes is that the colors are all of the same soft tone so that a green can go next to a red or an orange next to a pink.
The Marigold Quilt
The Rabbitbrush Quilt
The Rabbitbrush Quilt
I'm calling this one 'Walking on Sunshine' after the song by Katrina and the Waves (1983). Cottons, linen, silk and socks dyed and printed in the colors of marigold. Hand quilted. Marigold are easy flowers to push from yellow to gold with a little increase in the pH from soda ash or chalk. Printing with marigold can be tricky as the cluster of seeds leaves brown marks on the fabric. Dried flowers are likely to print with more brown than fresh ones. Steaming or simmering for longer times also can lead to brown dominating the print.
The Rabbitbrush Quilt
The Rabbitbrush Quilt
The Rabbitbrush Quilt
Rabbitbrush produces a bright yellow early in autumn and lighter colors as the flowering parts start to fade. This quilt is made of cottons and silks. Hand Quilted. Wood, if unvarnished or untreated, can be dyed as well as fabric. Buttons were added to the rabbitbrush pots and then sewn onto to the quilt. Heating oak leaves and rusty iron bits in the rabbitbrush pot produced this blue-gray, which was unexpected. I thought it might push the yellow toward a greenish gray. Sometimes with natural dyes, you just never know.
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Part of a Bigger Story
The Yellow Project is part of my larger Around the World in 80 Dyes project that experiments with colors and textiles in countries ranging from, so far, Denmark to Morocco to Nepal.
Check the bigger picture at https://80dyes.com. From there, sign up for the 80dyes blog that includes updates to The Yellow Project and details about my travels.
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Have ideas, suggestions or questions? Send an email to JDay@80dyes.com.
Travels With The Yellow Project
Where to Next?
August 11-17 Artist in Residence at Wildacres Retreat in Little Switzerland, North Carolina, to study the effects of a wet environment and humid forest climate on dye intensity and color from yellow-producing flowers, with comparisons to dye from the same types of flowers grown at home in a semi-arid environment.
November 14-28 Proyecto 'Ace artist residency in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to continue The Yellow Project work. During the residency I will explore native yellow dye plants of Argentina, including Fustic and Quebracho barks, and Oxalis flowers. I will also be working with the yellow dyes from two important export crops for the country: Pomegranate and Onion. Expect plenty of website, Instagram and blog updates during and after the trip.
Check back for updates on other dye travels and events for 2025 and beyond.