Hello, and How to Dye with Fresh Flowers!

April 14, 2025

It’s been years since I last had a blog and I’ve truly missed it! I’ve missed the slower and more thoughtful pace of writing a blog post and communicating my creativity through it, and as the world seems to not make sence any more, getting back to familiar and slower practices might be a way to stay on track and keep my sanity. I’m very excited to get back to writing, my first blog was a sewing blog but this one is going to have a broader theme with natural dyeing and knitting at it’s heart, I hope you will find something interesting here!

The Botanical Study Project!

Lately I’ve been feeling drawn back to the early days of my botanical dyeing journey, when I was still attending the natural dye class. During that year I was experimenting with all sorts of plants not knowing If I’ll get any color or if it would be fast, but I had so much fun in the process and learned a ton. All these memories, inspired me to start a new project, where I would dye and experiment with various plants around my area and eventually knit a blanket with those yarns. As I was thinking the details, it seemed to be great idea to start blogging with this project and share with you the process of this botanical study.as I like to call it.

The yarn I’ll be using is my aran weight organic cotton and for the dyeing process I will start with a base of no mordant, tannin mordant and alum acetate mordant, afterwards i will use modifiers to shift these colors.

While for the most fast result, the plant based yarns or fabrics should be mordanted with Alum Acetate, for this project I don’t mind if the colors will fade over time, therefore I’m also dyeing with no mordanted and only tannin mordanted yarn.

For the first experiment of my botanical study I chose Crown Daisies as all parks and fields are covered with these flowers at the moment. We just call these flowers daisies (margarita) in Greece but I looked it up and my app says it is named crown daisy, I wonder, how do you call them in your country?

Crown Daisy is a very interesting plant; it is an edible leaf vegetable. As I was searching for the English name I read that it is quite rich in minerals, vitamins and has antioxidant properties, used in various recipes in Asian cousin.

Now let’s talk dyeing with fresh flowers!

To not make this post too long, I’ll just share only the dyeing process, and the details about the modifiers and what result I got from each of them will be in a future post.

Materials:

· 100 gr Organic Cotton split in 10gr mini skeins (2 skeins no mordant, 2 skeins tannin mordant (oak galls), 6 skeins alum acetate mordant).

· 100gr fresh crown daisies, flowers tops only.

Process:

I added the fresh flowers in the pot with boiling water, more than enough to cover the flowers and left them steep for about 2 hours (no heat). I want to leave them in the hot water for at least one hour, but often I get caught up in other things and I might forget and get back to the pot a few hours later, that is ok, it is actually even better!

Next I turned the heat on at a medium temperature, you don’t want to boil the flowers, rather have a very low simmer or even no simmer at all. High temperatures can easily make the colors dull!

After 45 minutes, I turned the heat off and left the pot without the lid and allowed the bath to cool. When it was cool enough to put my hand in, I added the damp mini skeins. You can strain the flowers beforehand as that will save you time later when washing the yarn, but as I’m working with only 100gr of yarn I can easily remove any petals that might stuck to the yarn.

From this point on I prefer to continue with no heat at all, so as I added the mini skeins in the dye pot, I worked them a bit in the dye bath so that they take the color evenly. For the first 10 minutes I move the yarn inside the bath very often and work it thoroughly. Than I left it in the bath for 24 hours, checking it every now and then and moving it around. With botanical dyes, time is your friend, the longer the yarn or the fabric will stay in the dye bath, the darker and richer the color gets.

The next day, after about 24 hours, I took the mini skeins from the dye bath and left them to air for about an hour, then rinsed and dried. These are the results and I'm happy with all the colors and the fact that just from one flower you can get such a variety of colors. Some of these will fade but truly i don't mind, i'm just enjoing the process and I can't wait to start knitting my blanket.