Natural Dye Kit

Natural Dye Kit for beginners - Pre-measured ingredients for learning how to dye with natural dyes on fabric or yarn

The world of natural dyes is vast and varied, and this kit gives the beginner dyer a perfect introduction into the beauty and wonder of creating colour from nature.

Included are the ingredients to dye around 4 metres of lightweight fabric, or around 600g of yarn, light to medium shades of pink, orange, yellow and purple. In other words, you will be able to dye 1 metre each of the four colours, for a total of 4 metres. Small garments or other items can also be used - it is up to you!

The dyes can only be used to dye natural fibres, not synthetic, but can be used with either plant (i.e. cotton, linen, rayon, hemp, bamboo, etc) or animal (i.e. wool, silk, cashmere, alpaca).

In order to be colourfast, fibres must first be mordanted, or treated with a soluble metal. Plant (cellulose) fibres such as cotton must also be treated with a tannin.

This kit includes alum (a foodsafe ingredient made of potassium aluminum sulfate) as the mordant, and tannin powder made from the galls formed on oak trees.

It also contains logwood chips (haematoxylon campechianum), which yield gorgeous soft purples, osage sawdust (maclura pomifera) for yellow, ground madder root (rubia tinctoria) for lovely peachy orange shades, and cochineal (dactylopius coccus) for pink.

Comprehensive instructions in the kit will take you through the step by step process of preparing your fibres and dyeing with these dried dyestuffs.

Please note that the dyed fibres in the photos are not included. They are there to show you what colours you can expect to achieve with the dye.


Contents:

90 g alum
30g gallnut
15g logwood
15g osage
15g madder
7g cochineal