DIY: Experimenting With Natural Dyes, Continued

I’m sure you guys known by now that I’m fascinated with natural dyes. I’ve tried fruit and vegetables, and I’ve tried eco-dyeing bundles with flowers. It’s so rewarding to experiment with different ingredients and the end-results are always a surprise. I have been continuing with my experimentation and last night I dried using a few different types of flowers on their own to see what colors they would yield. I love the idea of using flowers to dye Easter Eggs so I got some eggs to experiment on, as well as some crochet doilies.

dyeing with flowers

The three types of flowers I started out with are carnations, purple daisies, and yellow poms.

carnation petals

I always feel a little bit bad picking apart the flowers, but they look so pretty! The colors remind me of our March catalog.

yellow pom petals

purple daisies

dyeing with flowers

I filled each pot with a small amount of water and let the flowers simmer to extract the dye.

dyeing with flowers

It looked like the carnations were losing their color a little bit so I added in some of these fuscia colored daisies from another bouquet, and that really seemed to do the trick.

pink flower dye

The pink dye is such a beautiful shade and I love how the petals look so I left them in there.

pink dyed doily

The doily took the dye really well! It’s such a beautiful vibrant pink shade. The eggs seemed like they were taking longer to soak up the dye so I left them in the jar overnight.

natural dye easter eggs

dyeing with flowers

natural dye easter eggs

In the morning the eggs were a beautiful shade of pastel pink!

yellow flower dye

The yellow dye is a really soft, pale yellow so I left the doily in that one overnight as well. Unfortunately in the morning the doily still didn’t really take on much color.

dyeing with flowers

The purple daisies actually made a really pretty light green color! I left the eggs and a doily in this one overnight too.

natural dye easter eggs

In the morning they were the most beautiful shade of light grass green! This was my favorite color of all.

natural dyed easter eggs

Have you guys tried dyeing with flowers? I’d love to hear about it!

More DIY projects from the BLDG 25 Blog.

Photos by Julia.

 

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Alex Salvesen
11 years ago

I really wanna try this!

Lily
11 years ago

Have you ever tried making tea eggs? This post reminds me of the method. Instead of soaking eggs in dyes, you soak them in tea (it’s a chinese thing and typically made with spiced tea, but I did them with lavender earl grey once) overnight, but before you do that you crack the shell all over, using a counter or the spoon, so when you take them out you have this beautiful spider-webbed egg.

11 years ago

I really like your blog! I greet:)

11 years ago

LOVE this post!! Does anyone know how to make the colours stay on after a wash? (I want to dye clothes like this).

Christin
11 years ago

Oh oh love this! I think you guys should do a post in the future about tea dying! Been tea dying all my white lace all day today(:

dj
11 years ago

Just curious what you do with the doilies once you dye them.

11 years ago

beautiful idea!!!

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saffron
11 years ago

every easter my grandmother dyes eggs with onion skin. she wraps an egg in old nylon sock (or cuts old tights into little pieces. they have to be thin and see-through) with parsley leaves, and boils it in water with onion skin. When it’s over, the eggs are brown with yellow leaf . :)

Jodie
11 years ago

adding a bit of vinegar to the dye should help the eggs pick up the colour.

Jennifer
10 years ago

Wow! I love this. I like doing this with flowers. I’ve seen it done with vegetables like beets. Results are beautiful too. I love that you used doilys.

10 years ago

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Anonymous
9 years ago

can i also use these to dye hair??

Teresa Zipeto
9 years ago

I did this one year with onion skins and red cabbage leaves, the red cabbage when mixed with vinegar made a beautiful robins egg blue. You boil the eggs with either the onion skins or a mix of vinegar and red cabbage leaves. My dog loved them.

Yolande
9 years ago

I love it and I like to try it this year

Christina
6 years ago

This is one of my favorite posts!

Autumn
5 years ago

Hi there. They are so pretty! I’m curious if you added some form of mordant to the fabric before or after dyeing and how did the doily stand up to colorfastness?