Hopi Red Dye Amaranth Natural Dye Experiments #garden #dye #naturaldye #naturaldyes #growyourownfood

This is Hopi Red Dye Amaranth. As the name suggests, it was domesticated as a food and dye plant by the Hopi Nation in the southwestern United States. The brilliant magenta leaves and flowers produce a range of dyes for food and fiber, and the leaves and seeds are choice edibles. Last year I grew these in my North Carolina garden for food and dye and wanted to share the results of my dye experiments! I couldn’t find a lot of information online about using these to dye fiber but I did find a few references in my book collection that suggested these two methods: one jar filled with almost all vinegar + topped with water to cover the plants and one jar filled with just water to cover the plants, and leave these to sit on the counter for 24-48 hours. Sidebar: These plants have amazing movement in the garden too. I love how the leaves wave in the wind like they are happy to see you. I am happy to see you too amaranth! Have a great day! After I strained out the plant material, I could already see the vinegar dye bath was much lighter in color than the dye bath with just water, so I had higher hopes for the water bath. I mordanted a mix of sample materials in alum at 50% weight of fiber before putting them in these two dye baths to soak for another 48 hours. And as I guessed from how light the vinegar bath looked, it completely failed to dye any of the materials I put in it. Everything was so white after washing I just put it back in my scraps bag. It’s worth noting those were all plant fiber samples, like cotton and English ivy. But the plain water extraction was successful for me in dyeing animal fibers, such as silk fabric and wool yarn. So perhaps this dye is best suited to animal fibers, and not as useful for dying plant based materials. You can see those silk and wool samples after drying last year. They were a kind of strawberry milk pink initially. A year later, you can see the silk has lost some of its color and faded to a softer mauve, but the wool i