Natural Dyes

After my post on harvesting black walnuts, I decided to look around and see if we had any pecans. My husband and I found a few big pecan trees down the road and brought back a bag full. Now this is where the dyes come in...

Yes, I know I've read over and over to wear gloves while taking the hulls off nuts... Somehow it slipped my mind while I was hulling the pecans while reading my Managerial Finance textbook. (I'm trying to improve my multitasking skills!) So as you can imagine, my fingers and fingernails are stained a beautiful dark brown color! So, this is my disclaimer to the previous blog post, wear old gloves!

Honestly, yes it's unsightly and it will take several weeks for it to go away, but it's a lesson learned. It did get me to thinking though, about all of the great sources of natural dyes we have just laying around. Pokeweed berries (they are poisonous though, don't eat them) make a beautiful purple dye. As a kid, my sister and I would fill up quart jars of them and make dyes to draw with. We'd also draw on each other with the dyes and pretend we were Indians. I'm sure Mom appreciated that!

Pokeberries

I got to looking around on the internet and found this neat website I thought I would share. It goes over what plants to use for certain colors, how to make the dyes, and color fixatives. It's a lot more information than I can go over in one blog post, so here's the website: Natural Dyes.

 Has anyone ever used natural dyes themselves? What are your experiences? Let me know in the comments below!