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.
The three types of flowers I started out with are carnations, purple daisies, and yellow poms.
I always feel a little bit bad picking apart the flowers, but they look so pretty! The colors remind me of our March catalog.
I filled each pot with a small amount of water and let the flowers simmer to extract the dye.
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.
The pink dye is such a beautiful shade and I love how the petals look so I left them in there.
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.
In the morning the eggs were a beautiful shade of pastel pink!
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.
The purple daisies actually made a really pretty light green color! I left the eggs and a doily in this one overnight too.
In the morning they were the most beautiful shade of light grass green! This was my favorite color of all.
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.
I really wanna try this!
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.
Lily, I’ve never tried that! Sounds cool :)
I really like your blog! I greet:)
LOVE this post!! Does anyone know how to make the colours stay on after a wash? (I want to dye clothes like this).
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(:
Just curious what you do with the doilies once you dye them.
beautiful idea!!!
WE♥DIY:
DIYEARTE – DIY
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 . :)
adding a bit of vinegar to the dye should help the eggs pick up the colour.
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.
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can i also use these to dye hair??
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.
I love it and I like to try it this year
This is one of my favorite posts!
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?