Natural Dyeing with Pokeberry
At the end of last year I had the wonderful opportunity to dye yarn with some poke weed berries a friend had saved from the previous summer. Pokeberry is a fascinating natural dye. It's one of the few plants that can give a very strong fuschia pink, and color can range from orange to deep red to bright pink. It's also very easy to dye with, and only uses plain vinegar as a fixative.
These pokeberries were harvested by a friend and frozen for a few months before using. We essentially followed this recipe by Carol Leigh: http://www.hillcreekfiberstudio.com/CL-PokeberryRec.html. The yarn was scoured in a simple warm water + soap bath, and then gently heated in 4:1 water:vinegar, and left to soak over night. The berries were gently smashed and simmered in vinegar water for a few hours before the yarn was added. We strained out the plant material into two different pots and let them warm up over a fire circle while we sat around chatting for a few hours occasionally giving things a stir. The skeins were removed from the bath, but let to sit over night before being rinsed in cool water and hung to dry.
I made up skeins of several different yarns because I was curious how the different fibers would take the dye. These are all protein based fibers. There's some 100% sheep wool, an alpaca-silk blend yarn, and yarn rescued from a cashmere sweater.
Because we used two different dye pots which had different places over the fire, we ended up with pretty different colors of each fiber. In this photo, the two skeins on the left were in one pot, and the three skeins on the right were in the other. You can see that the unraveled cashmere sweater took the darkest dye, but one pot gave much pinker raspberry tones, where as the other tended more orangey red. Its my guess that the dye pot over the hottest part of the fire probably resulted in a slight browning that gave those orangey red colors. The center skein was the silk-alpaca blend yarn which took color the lightest.
This was such a fun experience. I finally got around to documenting the dyeing in my new Natural Dye Journal by Salt Textile Studios. I can't wait to use it to do more natural dyeing this year!
18 comments
I think the berries are the wrong ph for human consumption but apart from dyeing one’s hands, the acid ph isn’t risky . Wear gloves for picking the berries if you want to avoid stains on your hands. It’s nice to nature to leave some for the birds and to expand the plant community as a sustainability kindness. It will grow from seeds in disturbed soil. Thx to the author for this enticing project.
To everyone mentioning the toxicity, it’s only toxic if the seeds are chewed and ingested or if the red parts of the plant (stems/leaves) are ingested raw and would take a lot to cause serious toxicity. The plant has been safely cooked and eaten for decades and up until a few years ago, you could buy canded poke sallet in stores down south. The berries and roots are used medicinally and are a valuable appalachian/southern folk remedy for many health issues. Handling the berries for dye is not a problem since you won’t be eating them.
As for colorfastness, I would be curious if it holds after washing because in my experience, when I’ve used it as dye, it washes out with the first wash and when used as a paint/ink, it fades to a dull tan/brown as it ages, especially when exposed to light.
I was dying woven linen from old sheets with Orion peel and Kurkuma Power. It made a powerful yellow. Wonderful. Now I want to find out which natural sources I can use for the colors of the rainbow. Thank you for sharing your experimente. Warm regards, Eva
Love this. Wanting to dye a shirt red so I’m researching for that. Thanks for sharing this. Looks like you used an aluminum pot which I believe would be neutral for the dying process. Cast Iron pots and Copper pots will impart iron oxide and copper oxide into the color making them turn out different.
Wow! Would hope that you publish your journal