Leaves, Roots, Bugs, Fruits

Get to know our Go-To natural Dyes

The double-volume book Colours from Nature details an astonishing 422 dye plants and the methods for using their color on cloth. Indeed, almost anywhere we look in the living world, there is surprising color hidden inside the leaves and trunks of trees, the carapaces of insects, and the lichens and mushrooms sprouting from fallen logs. Everywhere, the potential for natural dye. And yet, when we designed our original collection of pieces, we chose only six dyes to use: indigo, weld, buckthorn, madder, cochineal, and pomegranate.

Some of our reasons were practical: we only had so much time and money to expend on various dyes, so much organizational space in our brains. But mostly, we knew that not all natural dyes are created equal. Some fade quickly when washed or exposed to sunlight, while others hold up admirably to routine use—and, as a handmade business focused on bringing you textiles to really live with, that’s a big deal for us.

We settled on a core collection of “classic” dyes, plants and insects that have been prized for centuries for their strong, lasting colors. No doubt new dyes will enter this lineup as we keep experimenting (in fact, we’re working with a few right now!), but it’s a pretty solid bet that the following colors will play starring roles in our textiles as long as we’re printing them.

Indigo

If you know only one natural dye, it’s almost certainly the rich blue shades of indigo. Indigo has colored the funerary wardrobe of Ancient Egypt’s Tutankhamen, the uniforms of Napolean’s army, and countless pairs of denim jeans. It is found in the leaves of several species, most notably Indigofera tinctoria, and there is evidence of its cultivation as early as 4000 BC. Here in the Southeast, the history of indigo is deeply tied to our country’s ugly history of slavery—plantations in South Carolina grew enough indigo to make it the state’s second most valuable export during the second half of the 18th century.

Extracting indigo is more involved than simply making an “herbal tea” with the leaves, as is possible with many dye plants. And, unlike most dyes, indigo isn’t applied through a single immersion bath. Instead, the cloth is dipped repeatedly into the dye, building up deeper and richer shades with each successive go. Our Reflection Scarves in Atlantic, for example, achieve their mid-blue color through three dips in the indigo vat.

Madder

Madder is another of the world’s oldest and most widely-used dyes. The color comes from the roots of Rubia tinctorum and Rubia cordifolia plants, which are dried and crushed. The resulting orange-brown powder can produce a range of shades from warm, deep reds to terracotta. Madder is the dye behind Turkey red, as well as Indian chintz fabric and the British Redcoats’ red coats. It was even found in the fossils of Pompeii! In our first collection, we use it in combination with buckthorn and cochineal to produce a warm, grapefruit-y pink.

Weld

The yellow hues of this dye come from the leaves, flowers, and stems of Reseda Luteola, the weld plant. Weld is native to southern Europe and has long been prized by dyers for being one of the clearest and most lightfast sources of yellow. In fact, weld is the oldest known yellow dye, used to color cloth by both the Greeks and the Romans. You may also know the plant by the names dyer’s rocket, yellow weed, or dyer’s weed.

Weld grows easily in our temperate climate here in Western North Carolina, and it is the first dye plant we have experimented with growing ourselves. The plants have a biennial growing cycle, which means the tiny seeds sprout in the fall, overwinter as small plants, and then grow to their full flowering height the following summer.

Buckthorn

Buckthorn is also a yellow dye, but its color is warmer and richer than that of weld. It comes from the unripe berries of the buckthorn tree, which is native to the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Unlike weld, which we put into the dye pot as dried plant matter, we buy our buckthorn as an extract. This means that the dyestuff has already been extracted from the berries and dried into a concentrated powder. In our first collection, we used buckthorn to add the warm tones to our Pennant Tea Towels and Napkins in Grapefruit.

Cochineal

Cochineal is the only insect dye on this list. It comes from Dactylopius coccus, or cocci, pinhead-sized insects that live and feed on the paddles of the prickly pear cactus. It takes about 70,000 dried bugs to make a single pound of cochineal, but the magenta-red color they produce is one of the natural world’s richest and most potent.

Cochineal has been used as a dye across Central and South America since at least the 2nd century BC. It was prized by both the Aztec and the Inca and, along with gold and silver, was one of the natural resources exploited by the Spanish to fund their colonial empire. The insects are still widely used today as colorants for cosmetics and food.

The dried cochineal we use in our studio looks like small, grey peppercorns. We grind the bugs into a fine powder and then extract their color by boiling the powder in water for an hour. We then strain this liquid and repeat the boiling process two more times to get as much dye out as possible. It is one of our most labor-intensive colors, but the rich raspberry shades it lends our textiles—including our Grapefruit and Blossom towels and napkins—is one of a kind.

Pomegranate

Pomegranate is the most versatile dye in this group. It is a color that comes from the dried and powdered skins of the beloved ruby fruits we look forward to every fall. Interestingly, that deep red shade has little to do with pomegranate’s appearance on cloth. The dye produces a soft golden yellow that can easily be shifted to a range of other hues with the use of different mordants. We print with titanium to get orange shades, mixes of alum and iron to get olive greens, and pure iron mordants to achieve the almost-blacks of our Under Over Bandana in Graphite and our Bird’s Eye Scarf in Cement. Because pomegranate contains high levels of tannins, it can be mixed with other natural dyes to improve their light- and washfastness.

Though the pieces in our collection are dyed using dried and powdered pomegranate, we’ve also started experimenting with getting color from fresh pomegranate skins. When Em worked in a restaurant last fall, her co-workers generously saved all the peels for her in the freezer!