Dyeing a Cotton Dress with Natural Dyes, Part 1: the Alkaline Mordent

I have a pretty dress but I don't wear very often anymore because it's peach, and peach is a colour that's not really me, y'know? I used to wear it to work, because I work in a Steiner kindergarten where our days are colour themed. Thursdays are orange days, and peach is kinda-sorta-close-enough to orange that I could get away with it. But with the reduction in my work days, I no longer work on orange day, so the dress doesn't get worn.

But I really like the style of the dress. It looks especially good with a pair of cowboy boots and a scarf. So, in an effort to make it into something I'll keep wearing, I'm going to try and dye it using natural dyes. I'm going to aim for a rusty red colour, or perhaps a chocolatey brown, but before I can try adding colour, there's a few preparatory steps I need to take.

I received a wonderful book on natural dying for my birthday a few years ago: India Flint's Eco Colour. It's an inspiring book, full of ideas for a number of dye-stuffs and processes and many, many beautiful pictures. In a way it's a little frustrating -- I want to be able to jump straight in and create the beautifully textured and 'eco-printed' textiles featured in the book, but I guess I have to learn the basics first.

Flint's book doesn't have much in the way of formulas or recipes, rather it provides the basic principles and it's up to the reader/crafter to develop the process themselves. So the following is an account of my experiment based on ideas in the book.

The dress is cotton, which needs processing and pre-mordanting before it will adequately take up colour from plant based dyes, which are acidic. Either an alkaline or a protein based mordant on its own will work, but one layered over the other will work better, and this is what I'm going to try out. For an alkaline solution, I'm going to use tea, and I'll try a milk solution for the protein.

I've decided to use tea because it's quite a simple process for my first project; I drink a lot of tea, and so have a lot of tea-leaves to hand; and the tea will also colour the fabric a little, which I think I would like. You can also use tea as a dye-stuff itself, like when you 'antique' fabric or paper with a tea solution. But in my case, I'm going to colour it further with other dyes. Eventually.

First, I collected all my used tea-leaves, and un-drunk (black) tea for a week in a stainless steel pot. (It has to be stainless steel, or some other type of non-reactive metal, or the metal itself will also act as mordent. Which could also be interesting.) All that week, the leaves sat stewing in a warm place, the solution getting stronger.

Then I strained the tea-leaves out.

And then a second time with a piece of fabric attached to the sieve to collect the finer particles in the solution.

The I soaked the dress in the solution for about four days and nights.

After soaking in the tea-bath, I spun it in the washing machine without rinsing it, and hung it out to dry.

I was expecting more of an colour impact from the tea. It's hard to tell in this picture, but the dress is ... well, not so much darker as a bit duller. I've since found out from another book that if you're using used tea-leaves, you need to use significantly more, which seems kinda obvious really, but I didn't think about it at the time. Since I used this process as a mordent, and not for the purposes of obtaining colour, I'm not too worried. If I wasn't going to use another mordent process, then I would probably repeat this process with the tea-leaves, just to make sure that the mordent would work. But I'm going to also do a protein mordent, so between the two, I'm sure they'll work.

And now, I'm going to 'rest' the garment. That is, put it away in a draw for a week or two before doing anything further to it, to allow the mordent to 'develop'. This part isn't absolutely necessary -- you could dye it straight away -- but it helps achieve better results. Some natural dyeing traditions recommend leaving it to develop for a year! But I'm just going to leave it for a month or so, all up.

And so that's the first part done. Stay tuned for part two: the Protein Mordent!