Experiments with dye plants

Over the last few years I’ve been growing a variety of plants and flowers specifically for dyes. As I started refining my overall exhibition that I’m working on, I realized I wanted to use naturally dyed yarns as much as possible. So today I’m beginning some experiments to see which flowers will extract (for dye), vs needing to steam them for prints, and which colors they make. I have to test, because I don’t have tons of some of the flowers, so there’s not much room for error.

To test I’m taking a few petals, crushing them just a little (surface area to extract the dyes), and soaking them in water until I come back.

These images show the progressions (over a matter of minutues) of the purple poppies and the the scalet peony poppies we grew last year. The purple are just flowers we got seeds from the library for years ago and they come back so I wanted to experiment with them. The scarlet peony poppies were seeds we bought specifically for dye purposes. As you can see, there’s a huge difference in the amount of color extracting. There’s no heat or any additional manipulations done. Just petals and water.