Bane of my existence: Red Amaranth Dye

For about 3 years I’ve been growing red amaranth. The first year I grew it because it’s pretty. Then I found out it could be used for dye. The first year I was unsuccessful at getting the dye out. Year 2 I intentionally grew it with the idea of learning the extract the dye. I failed again. THIS year I said I would NOT grow it, but it popped up anyway. So I said, fine, I’ll try…

First I decided to do small experiments, because I didn’t have much plant matter. I tried heat, cold water, and various parts of the plant.

I got excited when my heat experiments started extracting color. BUT when I came back the color was gone. The cold water experiment was super successful. It made a beautiful color. So I was ready to dive in!

I extracted some color and then added yarn AND fabric, because I was so excited. They took the color immediately! I was so excited. So I left them overnight.

Except overnight turned into several days. And well…

The color completely faded and extracted and was ruined. I do like the color on the glitter one, but otherwise it was a disappointment. Now I’m having to decided what I want to do. I may wait until I have another crop of red amaranth or I may overdye with something else. Either way, I’m super sad I didn’t have a gorgeous magenta/ pink color. I did learn though that 1. Some plant dyes are best extracted cold. It’ll be trial and error to determine which are which unless I find info, but sometimes I can’t. 2. You can’t leave the dye materials in dyes forever, longer is not always better.

*Please excuse the video formatting. They were taken to make tiktoks etc. It’s a recent development to be able to upload videos directly to the website. Now I have to figure out how I want to make videos now.