Going wild with tartan design -- native natural dyes in New England?

[Wompet]

I wish I were up home right now - my parents have a set of arts and crafts books, and one volume had a list of natural dyes, what fabrics to use them with, which mordants to use and how they would affect the final colors. If I remember right, they even listed when to harvest the plants for the best effect.

[betsyk]

...but this is a topic I actually know something about!

You may be surprised to know how difficult it is to get any real color from natural sources in New England. You can try sumac berries, dandelion roots, beets, the bark of a crab apple tree, Rosehips, chokecherries, dried hibiscus flowers (red or dark pink), or wild ripe blackberries -- if you can stand the thorns! I've tried the sumac berries and the blackberries with little luck. Dried hibiscus gave me a light reddish-pink, but it was not very washfast.

The best blue I've ever gotten was from red cabbage, which is at least very easy to grow or buy, but it was a light blue and not especially washfast. You can get nice yellow/orange colors from onion skins, goldenrod, and jewelweed. There are also a lot of wildflowers/weeds that supposedly give good color... And I almost forgot Coreopsis Gigantica - which will give a spectacular and near permanent orange color if you do it all just right, which is entirely more trouble than almost anybody would want to go through...

Natural dyes are not only more complicated and "fussy" to work with than chemical dyes, but they're surprisingly more toxic. Go figure.

[Carolina Kiltman]

When I was in graduate school a century or so ago, I took a course in Fabric Design. One of the sections was on vegetable dyes. I have forgotten most of what was there (I still have the notes, but they are buried!). I do remember the beautiful pastel, soft (not harsh as aniline dye) yellow. The vegetable was onion, and the mordant (if memory serves) glauber's salt (sodium sulfate).

Good luck and above all, have fun with it!

[MacKay71 Wife]

There is a wonderful place located in North Georgia near the North Carolina border called the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center. They have an Artist-in-Residence who is a weaver. Her name is Sharon Grist and she makes most of her items out of hand-dyed yarn. If there's a way to get a beautiful, natural dye, Sharon will know.
www.foxfire.org/thevillageweaver.aspx
706-746-5828,
The Foxfire Fund, Inc.
PO Box 541, Mountain City, Georgia 30562-0541.