Rebecca Desnos

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28th January 201616th June 2018

Dyeing with carrot tops

Carrot top fabric with seaweed dyed fabric; the colours complement each other beautifully.
Carrot top fabric with seaweed dyed fabric; the colours complement each other beautifully.
Bamboo Carrot tops
by RobFOSDye experiments

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Seaweed bundle dyeing
A pair of avocado zip pouches

My books on botanical dyeing…

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Plants Are Magic magazine…

The {independently published} magazine for makers, dreamers & plant lovers…

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  • The Nature Creative – An interview with The Dogwood Dyer
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  • I felt like making a mandala today, but a more permanent one printed onto fabric 🌿 The leaves and flowers here are hammered onto fabric, then the print is ironed to help set the colour and I’ll wait a few weeks before rinsing it. The longer we wait, the better the print will last. I learnt this plant hammering technique from @samorn_sanixay 💚 Samorn wrote a step by step guide in volume 3 of my magazine ‘Plants Are Magic’ last year and I’ve been in love with this method ever since 😍 The magazine is still available in my shop: www.rebeccadesnos.com/shop 💚 in print and also as a digital download. The hammering part is quite noisy 🙉 but collecting the plants and arranging them is really lovely and relaxing! I recommend it, if you’re looking for something to do one afternoon 💚🌿✨ Have you tried this before❓
  • The type of dye pot matters ✨ I did some pomegranate skin dyeing a little while ago and used two different dye pots to get different shades. The inside of the skin of (some varieties of) pomegranates is bright yellow, and with a gentle simmer in some water, the yellow is easily coaxed out to make a rich dye. The yellow stayed really vibrant in the aluminium dye pot (the pot my hand is holding in the photo) and the yarn ended up a sunny yellow shade. In comparison, the stainless steel pot produced a much duller shade of yellow. It looks quite dramatic in the photo. The washed and dried yarn from the stainless steel pan is still yellow.. just less sunny. Aluminium pots can really help brighten dye colours. My water might also play a part in this, and also the type of pomegranates. Sometimes I get much brighter colours, and other times the colour is less intense. I’m often asked why I use aluminium, and it’s because there is some mordanting benefit from the metal. It’s a reactive metal and helps the dye particles bond to the fabric to some degree (a bit like using alum powder as a mordant). Also, I find that aluminium helps produce bright shades with some dyes, as you can see here. Just don’t cook food in aluminium - it’s far too reactive and it’s not healthy to eat food that’s been in aluminium pots! But if you already have a stainless steel pot, then use what you have! Maybe you have an old saucepan that you’re happy to decommission from the kitchen? Perfect! Begin dyeing with what you have and don’t feel you need to buy something new. Then in the future, if you’d like to buy a larger pot for dyeing bigger pieces of fabric, then maybe you can search for an aluminium one if you choose. What kind of pots do you like to dye in? Do you use old kitchen pots? Or always buy new ones? Or search in second hand shops? (Mine are a mix of pots I’ve bought new, and a couple of smaller old kitchen ones.)
  • Today I enjoyed having a play with these beads that I dyed. Making patterns with beads is so calming... it feels a bit like arranging pieces of fabric to make a quilt, but of course there’s no sewing involved! Just string the beads and it’s done ✨👏 I could carry on forever making new patterns and colour combinations! 💚 I dyed all of these using my usual method from my new eBook Botanical Dyes on Wood. 🌿 Some of the dye plants I used were: - pomegranate skins for yellow - alder cones + tea for brown - acorns + eucalyptus + iron for grey - avocado skins and stones for deep coral 💛 Also, some of the grey beads have been oiled and some have been left raw. This gives an even wider colour palette as the beads without oil look almost blue! 🍂 What do you enjoy making to relax?
  • Some dip dyeing fun from this weekend! ✨ The pink is from last week’s avocado skin dye pot and the incredible sunshine yellow is from pomegranate skins. 🥑 The fabric is all plant based/cellulose and was pretreated with soya milk, following the usual method that’s in my book and eBook ‘Botanical Colour at your Fingertips’. Click on the link in my profile to order it, or search my name on Amazon. 🌿 The paper was also dipped into the hot dye. It’s so much fun! There’s a recent blog post about dyeing paper over on my blog. To read it, head over to www.rebeccadesnos.com/blog. 🌱 These are my happy colours. I always come back to these dyes... they make me feel energised. What are your favourite colours and dyes at the moment?
  • It’s avocado dye time 😍🥑 ✨ I used the skins of about 10 small Hass avocados for this dye pot. I followed the usual method that’s in my eBook and book Botanical Colour at your Fingertips. I simmered the skins in water in an aluminium pan for about an hour, then turned the heat off and let the dye bath darken over night. 💚 I’m dyeing an organic cotton scarf that I pretreated in soya (soy) milk before dyeing. I did some very simple tie dyeing and tied fabric strips along the length so white bands will be left where the dye can’t reach. 🥑 This is the first big dye pot of the year for me.. so many things have happened and I haven’t been able to do much dyeing. It feels really good to be doing this again! Dyeing makes me feel like me again! 🌱 What have you been making/dyeing/crafting lately? Do you have a dye pot on the go right now?
  • A very early spring mandala ✨ Spring seems to have arrived early here (in the south east of England), and it felt like the perfect time to go for a gentle walk and gather a few of my favourite plant-friends for a mandala. 🌿 Several of these are dye plants... ▫️Nettles make green/grey/beige/tan shades. The colours vary so much through the seasons! ▫️Alder cones make caramel and tans. ▫️Dandelion leaves made a greeny grey when I tried them last year. ▫️Dandelion flowers made a yellow/tan the last time I tried them. My son often talks about the dandelion dye we made together — we must try it again! 🌱 Cleavers, interestingly, don’t make any dye at all.. I tried them a couple of years ago and the dye bath turned a promising grey, then the colour washed out of the fabric entirely, leaving absolutely no trace of colour! I think cleavers are best left for eating, or making spring tonic drinks! 💚 So this is my very simple mandala... 10 minutes of calm at my table. Bliss! I thoroughly recommend making a mandala as a way to unwind and enjoy nature’s offerings. I made my last one in the autumn.. it’s a lovely way to celebrate each season. 🌿 Have you made a mandala before? And what’s going on outside where you are right now? Are the seasons transitioning yet?
  • There’s a new blog post up on my website where you can learn how to carve your own beads. It’s a guest post written by @knivesfoxspoons and it’s perfect for beginners! Pop across to www.rebeccadesnos.com/blog to have a peek! 💛 The elder wood beads here were dyed with pomegranate skins (yellow) and avocado skins (red/brown). 🌿 When I released my eBook ‘Botanical Dyes on Wood’ at the end of last year, I dreamt of carving beads to dye. We have wood all around us, after all! One of the questions I’m asked the most often is where to buy sustainably produced beads. All along I’ve felt that the answer was to make beads from branches. Using local materials and making them ourselves is the most sustainable option. 💚 Let me know if you give the tutorial a go. I’d love to hear! I’ve ordered a Mora knife (as recommended in the blog post) and I have a couple of elder branches ready to start carving. I’ll let you know when I get started! 🌳 Have you tried any wood carving before?
  • I did a bit of dyeing yesterday and experimented with a couple of herbs that I had in the kitchen. First I tried neem powder (which I bought last year to make a mouthwash) and moringa which I’ve recently fallen in love with. The dried moringa leaves make a delicious tea and the fine powder is fantastic stirred into most things, like porridge and yogurt. It’s an incredibly nutritious plant with very high levels of iron and many other nutrients. . These are the gentle colours from an overnight soak in the dye baths. The cotton and bamboo silk fabric were pretreated in soya milk using the usual method in my book (Botanical Colour at your Fingertips) and I used an aluminium pot (pot as mordant) as usual. . Both sets of fabric both have a slight scent, even after a thorough rinse. Neem is traditionally used as a dye in India within the branch of ayurveda called ayurvastra, and it has antibacterial properties that are infused into the fabric. Maybe you remember the article about this in the first edition of my magazine: Plants Are Magic? (It was published a couple of years ago, but it’s still available in my shop). . I’m looking forward to chatting to @nainaayurveda more about all of this. We plan to write a blog post together about using these plants 🌿 . Have you used either of these herbs before and what for? Are there any other medicinal or ayurvedic plants that you think would be interesting to dye with? 💚

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