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

[-B-]

The Ma is quite representative of the colors available for dye. I think you are bit short sighted in you thoughts on this as most of the NE tartans are well with in line with availability of natural native dye materials.

reds - cranberries,beets, crab apple
blue- grapes or blueberries
green- many wild flowers that are native could be used
tan -oak bark

[Kilted in Maine]

Doh! I suppose I should have thought of OSV. Plimoth Plantation would probably be a good resource, too -- particuarly for the Native American perspective.

Here you go...


http://www.plimoth.org/embroidery-blog/category/dyeing/

http://www.eatonhilltextiles.com/

[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.

[MacKay71 Wife]

Yes, I know - Georgia is the South, not New England. However, for info it's a great place to start.

[The Wizard of BC]

When thinking about natural dyes and pigments there are a couple of things that you should remember.

Trade among the indigenous peoples of No. America was continent wide long before the arrival of Europeans. It was not uncommon to have access to goods from almost anywhere on the continent. A dye or pigment, that worked, was traded and traded again. So don't limit your choices to just your local area.

To create dyes and pigments you can't think just plants. Many, if not most dyes and pigments are from minerals. Ocher is Iron oxide and is found in yellow, red, and sometimes blue.
Minerals are ground and mixed with such things as fat, grease, and pine sap.

And the native peoples were not adverse to mixing things that we think of a nasty. For example a common way to make black dye is a mixture of Willow bark and urine. In fact urine is a very good mordant. It is also used to treat fibers getting them ready to take a dye.
(If you last name is Fuller it may mean that your ancestors may have treated Wool by walking barefoot on it in tubs filled with urine)

These are only a few examples but the idea I'm trying to get across is that you shouldn't limit yourself to your local plants when searching for Tartan colors.