Kitchen color

Making natural dyes from rainforest resources is not as easy as one might first imagine, or as the media would have you believe, because there just aren't brilliant, jewel-like colors shining from every corner of the jungle! Yes, they exist, but their occurrence is infrequent, and when they happen, they're often hard to find/see/access. Finding what makes a good dye, and how to liberate it and then fix it, is perhaps even more of a challenge. A challenge which I have recently taken up and you can follow these experiments HERE.

Right now, however, my best success seems to be coming from the kitchen, not the forest!















Onion skins on various cotton based fibers, a soft golden glow.















Red cabbage on a plum/admiral blue shot silk taffetta (below). The resulting color (on top) is so rich and autumnal, and the image doesn't do it justice. What happened was that the blue thread turned green, and the plum thread just got a little browner. I love this! It's such a small silk scrap that I will probably use it to make an Indie-Pendant.