Recipe to dye your own clothes with natural dye
We dive into the kitchen. Not to cook, but to dye a garment with natural ingredients. After all, an avocado seed can turn a garment permanently pink, a rusty nail makes for a splashy purple hue and onion peels can turn a garment yellow or red. Roua knows all about natural textile dyes and shares an easy basic recipe. We share a recipe for one T-shirt. If you have a larger or smaller garment, you can adjust the quantities a little.
Tools
- deep pan
- spatula for stirring
- thermometer
- 32-40 gr aluminium powder
- bottle of vinegar
- 12-20 gr powdered natural pigments (on sale in Roua's webshop, among others)
Instructions
Preparing (garment pre-treatment)
- Bring a pan with 3 litres of water to the boil and remove it from the heat as soon as it boils.
- Add aluminium powder (for 1 T-shirt you will need about 32g and for a pair of trousers you will need about 40g).
- Put the garment in the pan with hot water. Make sure the garment gets completely wet.
- Leave it like this overnight, about 12 hours, at least.
- Remove the garment from the pan (do not rinse!)
- This treatment is important so that the pigments will later soak in better.
Basic clothing dyeing recipe
- Put the pigment powder in a large pan with water. Heat this to 80-90°C. Important: the water should not get hotter, otherwise the garment may shrink. Wool should absolutely not get hotter than 55°C.
- Put the (still wet) garment in the pan and leave it for 1 hour. Every 10 minutes, stir the garment with the spatula to allow the garment to absorb the colour evenly. Keep the temperature even on low heat. Cotton and linen should be kept at 60-70°C. Do not let wool get hotter than 40-50°C.
- After about 1 hour, the pigments are well absorbed and you can start pouring it off.
- Clean the pan for the final step.
Garment fixation
- Rinse the garment with cold water.
- Fill the pan with 1 litre of cold water and 1.5 litres of natural vinegar. If you need more or less, these will remain the proportions.
- Soak the garment for three hours to allow the colours to soak in properly.
- Wash the garment separately in the washing machine at 30°C. Use ecological detergent. Do not tumble dry the garment.
- After this, your garment is ready to be worn. It will no longer shed in the wash. To be sure, you can wash it a few more times separately.
Notes
Want to make your own dye? You need about 20 grams of onion peels to dye 1 T-shirt and you need about 20 avocado seeds and peels to dye a T-shirt pink.