Josh is in his first year of 4-H. One of his projects is visual arts. One of the activities he selected is dying fabrics using natural materials. Today we experimented with red cabbage.
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| 1) Fabric soaking with alum |
1) We soaked cotton fabric in simmering water with a few spoonfuls of alum. This is to pretreat the fabric so it holds the color better. We did not do this step with all the fabric and we had similar results. (I think it would wash out without this step.)
2) Josh helped chop and tear up on head of red cabbage. The kids thought the inside of cabbage looked like brains! The cabbage was put in a pan with a strainer and covered with water. It simmered on low for over an hour. Occasionally we stirred the cabbage.
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| 2) Red Cabbage simmering |
3) The cabbage liquid was put into 3 different containers. In the first we added a spoonful of baking soda to get a blue color.
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| 3) Blue dye with baking soda |
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| 4) Stir occasionally |
4) Josh stirred the fabric occasionally and let it soak in the color for a few hours. We did not use heat for this step.
5) We added a few squirts of lemon juice to the original cabbage color to achieve a purple color. We expected to get red but it was definitely purple. Josh wanted to try to make green. We added a few spoonfuls of baking soda until the liquid turned green.
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| 5) Purple and green |
6) Josh loves the boy colors (blue and green) and doesn't care for the purple fabric.
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| 6) Josh with his blue and green fabrics |
In recent weeks we have dyed fabric yellow by using onion skins. We used wild grass to get a yellow that was a bit darker. Some things we tried but failed: using oranges, orange poppy petals, and whole dandelions. None of these made enough color to dye to fabric. Cabbage is our favorite so far!
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| Purple, green, blue, and yellow dyed fabric |
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