I Tried Dyeing Fabric With Plants From My Backyard 

"Yay, I made dirty fabric!" You learned techniques for several colors of antiquing fabric, very important for costuming 👍👍

If you ever wanted to surprise us with an extra video in one week sometimes im sure we would all be delighted to have a second video from you!

Normally I enjoy watching you wing things. But this time, because I've done a fair bit of natural dyeing, I was sorry to see you waste your time. Wild Colours by Jenny Doan is very, very useful and some of the book content is available on the website. I looked up "lantana as dyestuff" and from the first research paper I saw, it requires a metallic mordant, like copper sulphate or ferrous sulphate. But the colors are still mustard to brown. I've never heard of plain salt as a mordant, but weighing matters, and the quality of your water matters (ours is hard and ruins colors). I think that with the rosemary, you needed about 3x as much plant material. If you want an easy, successful batch - try Queen Anne's Lace - leaves and flowers yield a lovely lemony yellow.

2 videos a week is okay too, you don't have to limit your self ♥️ I always love seeing your videos 🌲♥️

It does give really good insight into why dyed fabrics have been so valuable throughout history and why people went crazy for vibrant hues. Chemical dyes are a relatively recent development that we've all come to take for granted. It's good to have some perspective on that and appreciate it more. 🙂

You need to leave the fabric to dry with the 'dye' in it, with the mordant in the mixture. Then after it has been in something like a plastic bag over night you rinse it to get anything out left over. Plus heat fixing, ironing, the fabric before rinsing also helps to keep the natural dyes. And the Fabric HAS to be a natural fiber in order to dye with natural dyes. I live in the north of England and regularly use foraged goods to dye fabric, and the steps above I have found to work each time.

I want to say thank you for giving me the confidence to just wing it. I threw together a skirt at the last minute for Christmas (pattern, what pattern?) and while it didn't exactly turn out perfectly (and let's not talk about hem length), I learned a ton, had fun, and made sure it had pockets. Pockets and comfy, and the rest will come with practice. I've been enjoying your videos for several months and now I just went for it. Thank you.

Cotton is very difficult to dye. You need to have the mordant in the pot with the dye and fabric to allow the dye to penetrate the fabric. You will likely need to use the Alum or Soda Ash with cotton. You won't be able to dye cotton with Vinegar.

60 year gardener here. I never eat lantana berries, great bird food! I grow a few things that are toxic until ripe, and the birds generally grab them the second they are ripe. I also feed wildlife. I want to dye too. I bought a big pot. Can't wait to figure it out.

Cotton is very difficult to dye with natural dyes. And salt isn’t a mordant unfortunately. Some blogs or things you find online may say it is but dyeing is very sciency and salt isn’t a mordant. I highly recommend dyeing wool! Wool is much easier because it’s a protein fiber. I have dyed wool yarn with black beans and acorns very successfully.

I think you have to add mordant to the thing that’s producing the dye as well as the fabric 🤷🏼‍♀️ I do know that avocado skins and red cabbage work really well! I’ve dyed with both and get gorgeous pinks and blues.

Also, your fabric isn't ruined. Now you have antiqued your fabric for other projects in the future. Albeit with a bit more work.

Avocados and onion skins are far kinder starters for natural dyes 💚

Alum at the store is slightly different from dying Alum and also way more expensive, would suggest getting it from Amazon or something. The thing about mordanting is not every mordant works with every fiber and dye stuff. Like vinegar won’t work as a mordant on cotton, it’s specifically more for protein fibers and an acid dye. When it comes to natural dying and guessing what color something will turn out…..most of the time it’s going to be yellow. If you want a win I highly suggest getting some rose madder root powder and a muslin bag to keep it from sticking to the fabric. I like natural dying but it’s a lot of work and so for my sewing projects I just use fiber reactive dyes and it’s still quite a lot of fun.

I enjoyed the chatty bit at the table but oh man I was yelling at the screen “why are you picking out the bits and putting them back into your pile of berries?” 😂

I've seen people use avocado skins and pits to dye fabric, it creates a very nice pink

...I want to take this opportunity to say I love your CC's - you put the FUN in functional 🤓 I especially like the transcription of the theme tune *chef's kiss*

Salt is for plant fibers (cotton, linen,) and vinegar is for protein fibers (wool, silk.) You'll need specific, commercial dyes for polyester. There is a ratio, i.e. x amount of salt or vinegar per y weight of fabric, but I can't remember what it is or where I found it. I think I have dyeing notes, but I'm moving and my notebooks are packed. Pre-wash your fabric, then pre-soak your fabric in water with salt/vinegar for at least overnight. I got my best results when I soaked fabric for four days, but that's overkill. You need salt/vinegar in your dye bath, too. I've never used soda ash or alum because - I didn't feel like it. I've dyed fabric, yarn, and clothing using food dyes (Easter egg tablets and liquid dyes,) and RIT dye. If using a commercial dye, follow their instructions. Chem Knits Tutorials has a lot of info on using food dye. If using non-food-safe dye, DO NOT USE ANY TOOLS YOU'VE USED FOR DYEING FOR FOOD. DO NOT.

It's always good to have videos prepped ahead of time. If you become ill, you'll still have videos to post.

I love lantana, but it never occurred to me that it might be edible. I once dyed fabric with avocado peels. It made a lovely pinky mauve color. Other than that I use commercial dyes. I bought a big tamale pot to dye in.

Black walnut hulls make beautiful browns . No mordant necessary. Queen Ann lace gives a yellow, needs mordant. I’m a spinner so usually dyeing wool or other animal fibers.

Sorry to see that the dyes didn't work out but we had the pleasure of seeing you, so yay for us 😊. Wishing you a merry Christmas and a happy new year ❤

I think, as long as you're clear to everyone (most of all yourself), you could always upload extra videos at random if you happen to have extra stuff to upload! (I say that rather than maybe upload more times a week because it seems really easy to fall down the "more content, more content!!" hole). I definitely wouldn't be opposed to an extra video every now and then! Also, that new sweater dress at the end is _so_ cute and looks _so_ cozy!

You could always work on a few projects at the same time and post extra videos when you feel like it. It's like to see cooking videos. It's good to see things that don't work sometimes. That is the reality of natural dyed. A lot of natural dyes are not lighfast, even if you get good colour, so it's hard to use them for clothes. I've read that madder, indigo and weld are the best natural dyes for lasting colours.

Being several weeks ahead sounds awesome! I haven't been making content on youtube for very long, but I got really burnt out pretty quickly trying to make one video a week when I started. And now it's been two months since I've put anything out. I do all the editing, too, and it's a LOT of work. But I figured out how to make youtube shorts and instagram shorts when I'm not making full-blown videos. I think that is how I will deal with not being able to make a full video for now while I'm figuring out a more efficient process.

Onion skins are a fun dyeing experiment. Depending on what mordant you use, it can give you different results!

AHHHHHHHHH, HOODIE DRESS PT. 2OOOOOO! Looks amazing and hardcore cozy. I'll definitely watch for better pics on Insta. Other more expert folks have given you better advice, but as someone who uses natural dyes on her hair, yeah the mordant goes in WITH the dye. But buying a dedicated stock pot to use with dye was a brilliant move and I'm impressed. Winging it with forethought. You will need that! ...you could always give us more videos per week, assuming you don't burn out. I will watch as many as you make.

Hi Charlie, I watched a video the other day about Victorian times, and they used stale urine, (yea, it stinks, but is free! 😂), as a mordant to die with plant materials. They did not have polyester and alike in those days, all natural fabrics. They just added some stale urine, the plant material they wanted to use, and let it all simmer for as long as needed per die. Some an hour.. I guess you really need to do a bit of research on this, but there are really good books about it, I hear! Good luck! I wish you and your hubby wonderful holidays! Hugs! 🤗❤ Video: How Victorian England Celebrated Christmas | Victorian Farm: Christmas (3/3) | Real History Skip to min. 32.35 to find the dying. And then 38.13 min. in to see the results.

I did a science experiment in highschool dying fabric with natural vs synthetic dyes and it was so much fun! From what I remember tumeric definitely has the best color payoff with the natural dyes, which is wholly unsurprising since it stains stuff so easily when you aren't even trying. And there were some red berries that worked really well too, but I don't remember what kind they were. It was such a fun experiment, and my mom kept the little 10 x 10 squares I dyed to make them into a quilted wall hanging!

The Reader's Digest Crafts book has an excellent overview of dying that you can adapt to the natural materials you have. It is thorough but brief and has useful pictures.

I was definitely eyeing that new sweatshirt dress. It looks great and I definitely want one

Be careful. Dyeing has been done for thousands of years. It has and can be done safely but keep in mind that we use mordants that are typically much more pure and concentrated than what folks used in the past. Alum is reasonably safe. Salt or soda ash work for plant fibers, so cotton, linen, nettles, like that. Vinegar will work with wool and silk or blends of the same. Some of the other mordants you need to be sure you have a mask on, preferably and N95 and work outside. Keep your pot for dyeing separate from your cooking pots and never switch them... and I really do mean never. Depending on what you are using you can end up leaving residues in the pots that you can not see and may make you sick/dead. Always work with a window or door opened so you can get very adequate ventilation. Gloves are also a good idea, as you learned when you were picking and working with the berries. Some stuff is far worse to have on your skin and can cause burns. Now that I freaked you out... Sorry, but also not that sorry.... have fun with it all, just be safe when you are working on things.

I LOVE what you're wearing at the end of your video!

Just watching all the past videos... but I got excited when I saw the mushroom jars in your kitchen! We have the same ones, just painted differently in our kitchen!!

You can use citric acid in stead of vinegar and it is much easier to dye protein fibres like wool and silk.

general comments: food stuffs (things that are edible) seldom make particularly good dye. often, even if they produce a nice color to start, fade very quickly to a stain. think, for example, about what happens when you spill food on a white table cloth. usually after a couple washings, you have a grey/beige/dirty looking spot. when i launched into dyeing, i found quickly that wool was the easiest option to dye, (you'll need alum, at minimum, as a mordant. there are other options but they are progressively more toxic), and many flower petals are lovely dyes. A Dyer's Garden by Rita Buchanon is my favorite easy to access book about natural dye!

Sooo, you’re holiday video is DYE HARD!?! I’ll see myself out. After watching, liking and subscribing of course

I would love to see a “Make & Bake” video series in which you show how to make a garment that’s inspired by something you baked/cooked. You might not get good traction from the baking videos, but you might get it by combining the genres since nobody else is doing it, thus giving you a wider audience within the RU-vid algorithm. Also, you should try dyeing fabric with CaitConquers.

I will take any and all videos you make!!! I have dyed exactly 1 piece of clothing (pink dress to red dress) and I made my best friend come over and hold my hand while I did it because I had no idea what I was doing 😂

You should try with red cabbage! I hear that comes out purple which would be far more fun.

I sing 1920’s love songs with my husband professionally but very part time since he got a job with regular hours. We do senior citizen environments, plus small-medium music festivals, and Ukulele Festivals on a regional basis. For 3 years he had a flexible day job and we had an expert agent. Those years, singing was my primary income. That was such a wonderful job! We still sing on weekends but Fridays are the best at Elder residences and lunch programs. Getting paid to sing love songs to my beloved is just the best job ever. And yes, freelance rocks. It’s hard to get bored but you’re always too busy. I do cat sitting and teaching Knitting, and I used to belly dance for 20 years and we sing, and I take care of my 89 year old mom’s needs.

I appreciate the random tangent! I’m also passionate about just making stuff and crafting and considering youtube as a way to have an income without withering away at some corporate job. I have no idea what I’m doing either, I thought taking two weeks to edit a video was too long, I don’t know how people do everything in a week either… but it was nice to hear about your experience :) And thanks for sharing the failures as well… since I 100% would have done the same thing with some plants in my backyard if I hadn’t seen this lol

How about filming those extra videos and having them in advance in case you fall ill, you need a time off or anything else? It brings piece of mind and you can always do a quick audio intro to say when you filmed it and why you post it now.

Once upon a time, Alum was a very precious substance. Alum wars were a thing! Good on yer for giving it a go :)

There is also a difference between staining and dying. Beets look like they would dye but in fact they stain and the fibers don’t stay colored. Also, they are never purple. Wool and other (edited) animal fibers/protein fibers (not plant fibers) are a lot easier to dye. You can dye them with food coloring or Kool-Aid. If you use food coloring, you need to add an acid (which can be vinegar or citric acid). If you use the right amount of Dyestuff with the right amount of fiber, and you bring it to heated (almost a boil) but you don’t stir it… because stirring will make it felt…, ideally, all of the dye bonds with the fibers and your water will turn clear. (This is a wonderful trick for Internet use.) It’s called “exhausting“ the dye. What’s really interesting is if you are dyeing wool and you measure a certain weight of wool and a certain weight of dye and it’s the right temperature, it doesn’t matter if you use a swimming pool worth of water or a pot’s worth. If you leave it long enough, all the dye molecules will find and bond with protein fiber molecules. You are welcome to contact me for more wool info., but I dye with “acid” dyes, some of which are food grade, rather than gathering natural plants and using mordants (the mordants that make the brightest color are unfortunately highly toxic). Interestingly, this means that some natural dyes are far more toxic than some “artificial” dyes. PS silk and nylon and other fur/hair fibers like alpaca, mohair, dog, etc, are dyed the same as wool. And there are other dyes that work on wool. I just know about acid (vinegar) dyes.

I always find it interesting when Americans go nuts over Lantana bushes growing in their garden. Yes, it's pretty. Yes, it smells nice. However, here in Oz, in most of the country, it's a noxious weed and the local council can fine you for deliberately planting it and/or not making serious attempts to eradicate it from your property. It has a voracious growth rate. I've seen it completely cover an empty quarter acre block of land in less than a year. If you have the time and the patience to keep it cultivated, it does have a lovely display. 🙃🐨🇦🇺

I know you love some research and not other types (lol) the dying is really affected by the fiber content and then a mordant. Some things require a mordant or... more. I dyes line and it needed a alum bath followed by a tannin bath to have the fabric really take colors. Of course that is for natural dyes. Had a whole weekend of it this year... even log dying! I will tell you that my teacher who specializes in natural dyes never told us salt would work (just for manmade dyes). Don't give up though! It was a blast to try onion peels, brazilwood, cochineal, and other cool stuff!

Hey Charlie, Why not try beats, mustard or tomato sauce? They're quite effective in changing the color of small sections of my clothing. & don't get me started listing art supplies, hehe BTW when you started this video, you showed us the golden berry bush, I thought you were gonna make a wreath. hUgz from Ohio, Lee

That dress at the end looks incredible!

Try wool fabric Also iron to 'sadden' (darken/ mute the colour) And I think the material of the pot can make a difference. I dont know a lot about natural dyeing but I've seen people talking about aluminium pots vs stainless steel vs cast iron

There is a pre-coloring detergent called synthrapol. The only place I know to get it is at Dharma Trading and I just use it in the washer. I've never used mordant.. thought it was for polyester. I use salt in the rinse water to hold the color. Dharma has anything and everything to do with dyeing.. including instructions.

Alum is a naturally occurring rock. "Pickling Alum" is a weaker version of the Mordant grade alum. They are the same thing. Salt is better as a post dyebath treatment: it usually "brightens" a color. Over in the vitamin/supplement section of your grocery store, you can find Ferrous Sulfate--a common dietary supplement. That works better as a pre-dyebath mordant. It will "sadden" a color: make it more grey toned. Shifting the pH of a dyebath will often produce variances in a color: white vinegar for acid and baking soda/washing soda/ lye for a base shift. All of these only need a very little bit to be effective, so chances of poisoning yourself/family/water center are pretty much non-existent. In future: you don't need to puree fruit/berries, simply crushing them with a masher/rolling pin will do. If you feel the need to puree things, put it into a cheesecloth that you can tie up jellybag style, then dump the jellybag into your dye pot, add water and continue on. That will save you the hassle of washing the pulp out of your fabric/fiber. Volume of dye plant to fabric/fiber is important also. Flowers of most types need to be 3 to 4 times the weight of the stuff being dyed. Barks and roots--depending on what they are from--usually need same weight to 2x the weight of the dye stuff. Barks/roots also stay better/longer than flower dyes.

Arm & Hammer washing soda ash. The internet says its official name is sodium carbonate and its chemical formula is Na2CO3. As a commercial product, this stuff goes by two names: 1) soda ash is its trade name and 2) Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda (not to be confused with baking soda) is its most recognized brand name. It's a yellow box, about 10 inches tall, with a red ring and an arm & hand holding a sledge hammer. It's found in the cleaning products area, usually on the bottom shelf. I used to mix Washing Soda Ash with 20 Mule Team Borax for a home made laundry soap. The combo cleans way better than any other manufactured laundry soap & gets out built up soap & grime residue left on your laundry, imo.

Algorithms are good at finding the one specific thing that can be used as the identifier to allow it to be grouped with other things with the same identifier. When a algorithm has a channel that is identified as textiles it will still promote your vid that is content wise a cooking to your textiles people. Like you said, some people would like that but then some of the textile folks would not interact the same with it as they would others. What it really messes with is the ability to promote the video (and by extension, channel) to a new audience. If it happens long enough the viewer numbers for all channel vids will tank. This is how i see it at least.

When l lived in LA l use to do background work too. I really enjoyed it. But since l have been in AZ l haven't been able to find any. My mother was actually sit in for the actress who played Ugly Betty when she was out of country.

Lantana is classified as a pest in Australia because it will unalive cattle/sheep if they eat it. Lots of $$$$ is spent on lantana eradication. Sending best wishes from Down Under 🥰🌺🌼🌸💐🇦🇺😎

Quick tip, if you want to have a win I died cotton yarn with tumeric (and salt) and it was BRIGHT amber yellow.

The next time that you want to use flowers let them Dry on a pc of fabric that you don't really care about and then also press them to get the floral oil out of it in that how you can get some die

#2! I was hoping we’d get one before the end of the year. How would blueberries or cherries work? It’s a short A sound in Alum, not a long A, by the way. It’s used in pickling, which is why it’s in the spice aisle. I had a friend who told me her grandmother, after many children, would bathe her nether regions in an alum solution to “tighten things up” before relations. 😳 0 of 0 recommended (not that I know personally).

You can use a collander to soft out the tidbits from your berries. Use it dry first.

I’ve always heard alum pronounced with a short a sound. It is what givers your pickles their pucker.

It was fun to watch you try ! Onion peels work well with a nice orange/yellow color and from what I recall, there is some "mordant" (chemical equivalent?) already in the onion.

well muslin is good for mock ups, if you ever need to do that for something? I'm sure you'll figure out what to use that material for.

I love that U tried to dye stuff. Wondered how it would go as my dyeing experiences in the 70s it was a fine art. I hope U do go back 2 background work part time. I like the variety of projects U take on. I'm one who likes Ur cooking vlogs too. I'd also enjoy 2 vlogs a week, bring them on. Merry Christmas. Ciao.

Sometimes even with research and experience things don't work. I woke to not pavlova in my oven. Sticky weepy mess. Trying to think of plan B. But for dying fabric onion skins make a lovely yellow.

I really appreciate how openly you talk about your preference to spend most of your time at home and have very limit interaction with people in general. When you prefaced your comment here with something like, 'I don't mean it to sound worrying, everything's totally ok' before talking about your background job being your only contact with people in general, I totally got it. People find it really hard to understand that not everyone needs that constant interaction to be mentally well and happy. Even though it doesn't match your situation, you might enjoy this short animation. It's beautiful. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-GQL0nSpMSwg.html I love a lot of things about your videos, but seeing someone speak openly about prefering solitude (and also the effort you put into captioning your videos) is fatastic.

Thank goodness you have a great sense of humour and I am so sorry but I laughed all the way through. May I say not because I dye, have dyed, know how to dye or even contemplate dyeing but because should I ever decide to dye ,this is exactly what would happen to me. Actually,I have just coffee and rust dyed fabric for a slow stitch project but that was fabric the size of a letter in US. 😂

Sometimes we just have to let our inner witch out to play. 😄

Alum is used in pickling.

Yes! More than one video a week would be lovely; however, if you are able to work up a backlog of videos that might he a good time to work on a mote involved project similar to your patchwork or maybe something historical if that was something you were interested in

Hi, Well I'm back with another letter. Back in my younger days in the 80's, there was a "lets get get back to the way our ancestors did things" movement going on in my country, and especially in the more rural towns along The Gulf of Bothnia, where I happened to live at the time. One of the popular things to do was going out to the woods along a river or even the Gulf of Bothnia (the water there was and is brackish at best), aka "the sea" in those parts, get a whole bunch of different things from the forest and dye wool yarn with them, and see what colors they'd get. I wasn't a part of that movement, but people I knew were, so I was told about it, and was shown photos. They were all women, and perhaps this was a "feminist" thing back then. I can't quite recall. What they did was taking wool yarn from actual sheep, probably scouring it with pot ash and rinse. Refill the pot with clean water from the stream, river or "sea" and put in the vegetable matter they wanted to play with. They used different kinds of lichen, blueberry leaves and stems (I think that our blueberries are called Logan berries in English), different types of moss and whatever natural things they could find. They would put the yarn in and whilst stirring slowly and vey carefully so to not shrink the wool, heat the whole thing for some time, cool and tip out the water, and use the river or the "kind of sea" water to rinse for a long time. After that, to make the yarn color fast, they heated more water with lots of salt and put the yarn in again. After this process was done, there was another good rinse (we get why they were doing this nearby a lot of water, don't we) and hanging the resulting product up on tree branches to dry. The colored yarn they came up with were astonishingly bright, but the color had absolutely nothing to do with the color of the vegetable matter they used to dye them. I no longer remember what kind of vegetable gave what color, but the colors were so vibrant. I came into the picture around this point because I would occasionally be offered some of the yarn for knitting. Compared to the commercially colored wool that you could buy back then, these were a revelation. The most beautiful colors and textures you could get. I remember making mittens in traditional patterns, from some of the wool, but thy are long gone now, many a move later. For more on this kind of thing, maybe check with women on RU-vid that does re-enactment work of medieval Europe. I've seen them fly by a couple times in other re-enactment videos. The ones I remember at the top of my head is The Welsh Viking, and Modern History TV, but I know there are others too. I have no idea if this little exposé from my youth has any bearing on your experimentation on cotton. Maybe using linen would be closer to my little story, linen having been around for a while, not withstanding that linen is made of vegetable fibers, and not animal fibers like the wool. Other than that, I'm back in Europe, My friend is in court order in-patient treatment for her psych issues, and getting closer to hospice by the day for the cancer. Hopefully she'll still be around after New Years, when I can get back to the US to see her again. Have a Merry Christmas, or whichever holiday you may celebrate, and a Happy New Year. Yours, Ann

I bet the purple cabbage would’ve worked tho. They are also very pigmented

Yeah, dyeing is a total chemistry experiment, even with man-made dyes! Which mordant, acid, etc. you use matters with which plant material or dye color you use and which fabric you use. It can make your head spin for sure! But with your brain power and curiosity, you'll get it figured in no time! You might also try to 'set' your natural dyes with heat or by allowing it to dry in the fabric and then putting it in the dryer before rinsing. Not that it matters to me but just for reference, Alum is typically pronounced like album minus the "b" because it is basically just short for saying ALUMinum which is the main component of alum. But you do you! I'm with some of the other commenters though in thinking that you could always do 2 videos a week if you've got the ideas and time! Or you could consider doing a separate cooking channel so you could have another creative stream and shirk YT's stupid algorithm! Just spitballing, thinking out loud and being selfish because I do so enjoy your videos! LOL

btw, I loved the tangent. I love to know that you have so many projects, and I am happy to know a bit about you as a person because, let's be honest, you are not only a ... professional RU-vidr (I am not putting the professional on quotes, because you have successfully manage to get an income out of your videos), but you are also a vlogger. And as a vloger (I'm no longer sure how many "g"s the word has), you have the RIGHT to have tangents and explain a bit of your life. In short... the reality is that I am watching your videos because of YOU, not necessarily because of content (although the content is right up my alley). You are fun, and I like to see you winging it. I am nor sure if I'll ever be able to do your tutorials, but is really because I'm such a beginner, so if I want a tutorial with measuments, I will go and look for them. For now, you are stuck with me, because I'm first a fan of Charlie, then I'm a fan of Charlie's Stitchery Channel.

Not sure if they allow arm and hammer ssuper washing soda in California but thats the scouring substance I use and i get it at walmart. I also by a bigger jar of alum from the canning area in the housewares section at walmart since its much more cost effective. If you have a middle eastern market near you they usually sell 100% indigo for a very affordable price so you can play around with shibori but like i said in my other comment hating on lantana use a stainless pot over an aluminum one.

Not an expert, but you might want to have a dedicated blender/blender-adjacent apparatus for potentially toxic plant matter so it doesn't leech into your food and such. Same for the utensils you're using to dip in the dye mixture.

Alum -- flat a like in And or Ant. Children who grew up with the Internet were trained so well by their teachers to NOT look things up on the Internet. If you don't know how to pronounce a word, just type in the word and the word "pronounced." (Sorry if this sounds angry or negative, but it's a pet peeve of mine that so many kids have been trained to NOT use a resource. I have six kids, and all of them have been trained to not Google it.) I love your TRY ALL OF IT videos. They are so thorough. I could ALWAYS watch your videos. Posting twice a week would be cool. If you can or will post more often, I'm here to watch.

Anyone who watched classic Looney Tunes cartoons will think that alum is something you eat that turns your mouth into a tiny little hole that you can't get food or words through. I don't know why that's in so many cartoons, but it was a thing back in the 1940s, I guess!

If you want some good natural dying tips check out the Margaret Byrd: Color Quest channel on RU-vid. She is a mixed media artist that uses natural dyeing as a part of her artistic practice. Or try the book Wild Color by Jenny Dean and Karen Diadick Casselman.

Should you be moved to try natural dying again, onion skins, either red/purple or brown/yellow, give very nice rich brown shades, even without mordant. You’ll want to use lots and lots, so you might start saving them every time you use onions in your cooking.

Charlie: "Time to DYE!" RU-vid goons: "Demonetized!" Charlie: "No, wai-"

Try dyeing with avocado, beet and onions

You could totally do two videos a week for a little while, and then go back to one when other work picks back up.

Not an expert by far, but I’m pretty sure you need way more dye material per amount of fabric. Plus, when I’ve done it, the mordant and the dye and the fabric were all in the pot at the same time!

❤

Charli, have you tried onion skins or marigold flowers?

Use citric acid instead of vinegar - both are weak organic acid. Citric acid is easier to store, easier to use and has zero smell.

Alum is pronounced All uhm as if a guy named Albert had the last name Uhm, or it is like the word Alumnae but with the accent on the 1st syllable.

In the age of googling, a little research could have helped a great deal and you would have been much happier with the results. Still for your first attempt . . . . I don't think of salt as a mordant for cotton cloth. And when you do use salt it is without iodine added.

Salt is not a mordant.

I'm glad you had a try at this before I did, I want to eventually dye my own evenweaves for cross stitch, but I looove vibrant colors. Did you at any point consider using pee as the mordant? I'd want to give it a go just to tick it off the bucketlist :p

for the big dye pot, how cheap was it and was it thrifted or new from somewhere? I've been trying to find a really big pot for dyeing and I can't seem to find a cheap one lol

Why did you lose 30k subscribers? I’ve been with you from when you had 20 or so, and I was rooting for you to hit 200k….then 30k went poof!

I'm worried for your puppy. Lantana is poisonous to.... well almost every type of mammal - dogs, cats, people, etc. Birds are okay with it though. I believe it's also classified as a noxious weed in Australia (or at least in some parts).

Unrelated to fabric or dye, what is the rack-like-looking thing over your stove?

I once tried to dye fabric w/ polk berries. All that brilliant color.... does not work at all for dying.

Dyeing is chemistry. All dyeing. I am not good at chemistry :( But to echo other commenters; cotton is not what you want when trying out new dyestuff. It requires annoyingly many steps to get it to retain any colour. I am currently wiating out my iron water mordant. It is Not Behaving.

I guess you have been told it is AL um, not A lum.

Was the pot also from amazon? It is beautiful!

Onion skins...will be yellow though.