As I am working from home and sometimes limited with my choices in fabrics, I wanted to try and dye my own using my garden materials. My garden had been such an influence on my designs that I thought it would be a great idea to try and use the natural materials there to create the dyes. I wanted to create greens especially because I could not really find any berries or anything that would create a pink colour. So I tried a nettle pot, and a grass pot too, which did not really go too well.
The nettle one smelt awful, and even after a good few days I could not really get the colour out of it to make any difference to the fabric, the same happened with the grass, the water got a little coloured but did not impact on the plain linen at all.
I added more nettles and boiled for longer, tried a few things, I was not very precise with the original recipe so this may have had an impact on it. I ordered a dylon packet anyway in a lovely natural colour so I decided to give this a go instead.
The colour produced was quite a natural earthy green which I do like, but also my collection is a little brighter than this so maybe I should have tried a more tropical kind of green too to see the difference, which I think I would have done if I had more time with this project. I did try out some tie dye techniques however to test the idea of the texture into the cloth, and I think I could work with bleach and how it reacts to the newly dyed surface as well.
Tahlia Paige 