A Garden to Dye For. Chris McLaughlin

Or to confine the berry bits, add the crushed berries to a nylon stocking or tightly woven mesh bag and let it soak in the water like a tea bag.

      Bark

      To get color from bark, it needs to be soaked for at least 4-5 days first (and some people soak it for weeks). After that’s done, put it on the stove and let it simmer for about an hour. Don’t let this bath come to boil, or your colors will be heavily muted by the tannins that’ll be released.

      Trees that have fallen or branches that have been pruned are all fair game. I prefer not to harvest the bark from a live tree. If you want to take a little bark off of one spot and then go to another tree and take a bit from there, and so on . . . the tree will probably be able to deal with that. Whatever you do, don’t start peeling the bark off all the way around a tree trunk; the tree may not be able to recover from the damage.

      Roots

      It has probably dawned on you by now that if you gather roots, this means killing the plant. This is often true, which means that you don’t want to go out and harvest these plants from the wild – unless it’s a noxious weed in your area and you have been given the green light. Many dyers will simple grow them as they would a vegetable; which is long enough to get it to harvestable size.

      For example, if you’re growing madder (heralded for the red pigment in its roots), you can plant a madder bed or patch for the express reason of harvesting their roots. In this case, you would wait for the plant to reach its third birthday before harvesting. If you can muster up the patience, a couple more years would be even better. You could use your gardening wiles and plant two or three madder beds, allowing you to harvest one bed each year (after they reached three years old) and replant the bed you harvested.

      If you’re interested in trying roots, but don’t want to kill your plant, you can very carefully trim away some of the lesser, side roots (ancillary) and leave the large roots undisturbed. Be aware that the color from the smaller roots won’t be as vivid, however. To prepare them for the dyebath, rinse them until the soil is removed. Then chop up the roots and add them to a pot of water. Lightly simmer for 30 minutes.

      I like to soak my walnut husks for weeks to get the deepest browns.

      Nuts & Husks

      We’ve talked about making a tannin mordant solution from acorns, but they can also be used to obtain mustard-y yellows to gray-browns. Just crush up the whole acorns and soak them in water for 2-3 days. After that, put them in a non-reactive pot on the stove and simmer them for about 2 hours. Strain the acorn bits out of the bath before you add your fiber. Once the fiber is added, however, to keep the colors from becoming dull, heat the bath to just below simmering.

      One of my favorite natural dyebaths is with walnuts, or more accurately, walnut husks. While you can certainly use the entire nut while extracting their rich, brown hues, I prefer to save the walnut meat in the middle for fall baking, thank-you-very-much. I remove the green (or brown) husks from the outside of the walnut and pop those into a bucket of water, while placing the remaining nuts in the sun to dry.

      Let the husks soak anywhere from two days to several weeks. Simmer for an hour and then strain the husks out of the bath before adding fiber. I should mention that the brown shades will vary depending on when you harvest the walnuts; while the husks are still very green vs. when they begin to turn brown.

      In the next chapter, we’ll set up a dyer’s workstation and play with some simple recipes.

Foraging Wild Dye Stuff

      If you’re harvesting plant materials from wild and native plants, this becomes a more serious issue. It might be hard to believe, but if people weren’t mindful, it wouldn’t take many foraging dyers to upset the ecosystem for plants and animals alike. So, when you’re foraging wild plants be sure to:

       Have permission to be on the land you’re harvesting from.

       Know the plant species before you touch it. You want to avoid taking endangered species and you don’t want to mistakenly gather a toxic plant instead of the harmless one. A good example is taking parts of poison hemlock as opposed to the lookalike, Queen Anne’s lace (wild carrot).