WORLD'S EASIEST VEGETABLE DYE HACK
MARVELL LANE experimented with different ways to naturally dye your favourite stained cotton and linen pieces. Our mediums of choice were avocado (which lift us with a delicate dusty pink...
With parts of Australia currently in lockdown due to COVID 19, we wanted to try and encourage all of our wonderful MARVELL LANE customers to stay busy, have some fun and try some simple natural dyeing at-home. We promise you won’t need an endless list of ingredients, and chances are you probably have most of them available in your kitchen cupboard.
There’s a variety of ingredients that you can use to create all the colours of the rainbow, however for our little at-home experiment, we chose to try the old faithful brown onions and avocado on our very own Simi Sarong. If you’re anything like our GM, Ally, and you can’t keep your whites white, then this is the perfect little at-home experiment for you!
So grab the stained white clothing in your wardrobe, and let’s get dyeing!
WHAT YOU NEED
- 3-5 litres of water (or as much as you need for your items)
- Brown onion skins (we used 5)
- Clean avocado pips/skins (we used 3)
- Clothing/fabrics to dye - natural fibres work best (we used our Simi Sarong)
INSTRUCTIONS
1. A) Add 2L water + 5 brown onion skins in a pot and bring to boil. Once boiling, simmer until the colour you want is achieved. Add water as it evaporates. We added another 2-3L as time went on. We had our brown onions simmering for 2 hours.
1. B) Add 2L water + 3 avocado pips and clean skins in a pot and bring to boil. Once boiling, simmer until the colour you want is achieved. Add water as it evaporates. We added another 2-3L as time went on. We had our avocados simmering for a little over 2.5 hours.
2. Strain water + remove all vegetable scraps from the water mixture.
3. Add clothing/whatever you're dyeing and leave in the mixture until desired colour is achieved. It will dry lighter so keep this in mind:) We kept ours in the dye mixture for 24 hours
4. Dry in the shade.
5. Wash on a gentle cycle + hang to dry.
6. Voila! Enjoy!
Please note there are more complicated processes for natural dyeing, however we simplified this as much as possible so anyone could do it! You can find plenty of ideas on Pinterest!
If you tried and enjoyed this journal post, please share your fabric dye experiment with us at @marvell_lane on instagram. We would love to see what you come up with!
- ML x
