Creating natural dyes
A little archive of dyes I made
Modern designers are spoiled. The digital software we use have every color that a human eye can see available for infinite use. With synthetic ink we can create most of these colors on paper. We often forget where these colors come from. I will try to extract natural dyes to use in bioplastics, so final products will be all natural.
All the products I used to extract these dyes were found in my home. My plan was to extract all the colors by cooking the materials I found. To test the dye I briefly put in a cotton pad while the dye was boiling. I don't think this was a very good way to test the dyes, but it's supposed to give some indication as to how the color will turn out.
🟩 Tulips
I received a beautiful bouquet of purple tulips and I'm in love with the color. After seeing classmates use hibiscus tea to extract a purple dye I wanted to try it with different flowers. After finding a mention in an article of using tulip pigments specifically to color bioplastics, I figured I'd give it a try.
The article doesn't show how they extract the color. They did state they used dried tulips. I didn't have time to dry them so I just used the boiling method.
I had 50 tulips, so I could afford to lose a few. I used the petals of 5 flowers. It hurt my patriotic heart a bit to destroy our national symbol of pride.
Shortly after boiling the petals lost their purple color. I expected the water to become brown, but after cooking it through for about 10 minutes this lovely bright green color appeared.
They look nothing like the original product, which is a bit of a disappointment but a beautiful green color nevertheless.
🟩 Basil
I still insisted on making a purple dye and after a quick search I found this article. They claimed that: "The same basil, Ocimum basilicum, that flavors your salads can also produce a nice purplish-grey dye bath. Different types of basil can produce different shades. Gather the leaves and stems and boil with water to extract the color." I was limited to the products I had in my house, so if "purplish-grey" all I can get I will have to work with it.
I'm quite skeptical, since no other articles I read mentioned using basil, and there is no picture of the end result. We will find out as soon
My basil plant apparently didn't like direct sunlight, so it was nearing its end anyway. I cut of all the stems and leaves and threw them in a pot. After boiling for half an hour and straining the basil out, I was left with a brown/grey dye.
I still felt a bit disappointed. Betrayed even. Although it's a beautiful color, it's still nowhere near purple. I think my trust in vague internet articles is damaged.
🟨 Massala
A dye with a bit of a backup story. After the two muted colors I made, I was ready for something bright and happy. Loes said that basically anything that will leave stains on a shirt, can create a good dye. I immediately thought one ingredient my mother always told me to never spill, the king of all stains: massala. As a person from a Surinamese and Indonesian family, I'm quite familiar with this ingredient.
This yellow spice leaves stains that are almost impossible to remove if you don't treat them immediately. Recently I did have a little accident, when an egg from my roti rolled of my plate onto my white cotton shirt.
I ran to the sink and used a stain removal wipe I had lying around. The color shifted almost instantly to a bright red red, which I had never seen before. I looked through the ingredients of the stain removal wipe to see if there was any substance that triggered this change in color, but i didn't know any of the ingredients. Eventually I successfully removed both the yellow and red stains with bleach.
Now that I know that under certain (unknown) circumstances, the otherwise yellow massala can show up bright red. I thought it would be interesting to make a dye out of it, which may have an unexpected outcome.
I cooked two teaspoons of massala in half a liter of water for 10 minutes. Then I strained through a sift and a coffee filter. It took quite a while to strain the massala powder out the mixture. I As expected the dye stained the white cotton, as this happened to my cotton shirt as well. I was secretly hoping for the red shade to suddenly show up, but I knew this was very unlikely.
I'm very happy with how saturated the color is. I wish I knew which ingredients turned the yellow to red, but I'm satisfied with the final result.
🟫 Coffee grounds
My coffee machine discards coffee grounds in nice round pills. We usually save them for gardening, so I had a lot to play with. I chose to go for the used coffee grounds instead of just coffee because I like the idea of using waste-products.
Since it took some time to separate the powder from the dye the previous time, I thought I could try containing the grounds in a filter. This however kept all the grounds tightly pressed together in the filter, and didn't give them the room to float around and released color.
I threw the grounds of 3 cups of coffee in a liter of water and boiled for half an hour. Then strained through a coffee filter.
I didn't expect for the already used coffee to release this much color. I like the smell, and i wonder if different types of coffee will give different colors.
Last updated
