Fun With Food! Coloring Yarns and Fabrics
It’s time to take playing with your food to a whole other level. Whether you enjoy spinning your own fibers or buying sustainable yarns and fabrics online, your choice of colors is limited to what the company’s designers prefer and think will sell. Take the look of crafts into your own hands by using fruits, vegetables, and spices to dye your cottons, wools, and other natural fibers.
Using food to color fibers is as nearly as old as agriculture itself. The more “modern” style of dyeing yarn is by using Kool-Aid. As eco-conscious crafters, we all know that is not much of a sustainable option. Head down to your local farmers market or co-op grocery store and you will find an endless supply of creative possibilities that are free of dangerous and questionable chemicals.
- » See also: Fab Fabrics: Organic Cotton Screenprinted by Showpony
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Lion Brand offers a great basic tutorial on how to use foodie finds to color yarns and it is a great place to start for new color advocates. Though they focus on dyeing yarns, you can easily apply the same principles to fabrics as well. The particular fiber as well as the length of time you leave the mixture in the boiling water will determine the shade and depth of your color. Craft Magazine published a wonderful article on natural dyeing in their 4th issue that goes into much more detail and includes info about using natural metals as well.
Have you ever colored your own yarn (whether it be with food, Kool-aid, or other substances - henna anyone)? Let us know about your experience!
[Image courtesy of Lion Brand]
I have successfully dyed wool with onion skins, turmeric, coffee, and lichen. The coffee was my favorite color! I have also done an indigo bath, but this is tricky. You have to remove the oxygen from the water. When you pull out the yarn from the indigo vat, it changes from yellow to blue before your eyes, as the oxygen in the air reacts to the dye.
Very nice, Jennifer! I can’t say that I have any personal experience with dyeing yarn, but boy am I interesting in giving in a try. Working with indigo sounds fantastic - blue is one of my all-time favorite colors.
VE
All of this yarn talk is making me want to learn how to knit…like I have that kind of time!
Learning to knit is pretty darn easy, but I’ve heard crochet is even easier. I got a kit for crochet from Chronicle Books but have yet to take the plunge to try it. One of my goals for this year is to complete my first sweater, and I have no idea where I’m going to fit tat into my schedule … but I’m make it work.
VE
[...] swore that fabric made from cassette tapes, was not an April fools joke, and learned how to dye fabric with a recipe for natural, non-toxic [...]
can you dye fabric with food coloring?