Natural Dyeing with Gardening Australia

As a general rule, I don't need a scarf because I've grown my own. But I'm wearing this one for a special reason. You see, a little later in the program, I'm catching up with a gardener and artist who has the ability to harness the power of plants to add colour to textiles in the most amazing way. And I'm hoping she can do something with this scarf. Wherever you look and whatever you grow, nature's palette has created an endless array of colours that inspire us gardeners every day. But they can also quite literally be bottled up to help create your very own designer clothing. Brightening up your winter wardrobe is cheap, easy, and with some help, I'm going to show you how it's done by dyeing my plain old scarf. Gina Mastio lives on Sydney's northern beaches. A textiles artist and plant dye expert, Gina knows how to create the most incredible fabrics by extracting the colours from what's in your garden. What I love about natural colours, there's no comparison. The palette of colour is so much more beautiful than a palette of synthetic colours. So this one, for example, is Eucalyptus Nicolai, which is some really dried leaves that I'd just gathered off a curbside. But also, if you were to use the fresh leaves, you could get something more like this, sort of a more of a burnt orange colour. And then this is a woven wool, but if you do it on silk, you'll get a different colour again. So your different fibres are going to take the dye in slightly different tones. I'm amazed that there's so many really bright and intense colours. This one's Buddleia. So that's from flower and leaf. The yellow there, that's from marigolds. So it's nice when you're gardening and you're cleaning up and taking off your deadheading of your flowers to encourage new growth. You can use all of that, not just in the compost, but first of all in the dye pot and then afterwards in the compost, which is, you know, you can do the full cycle of it. Here are some of the plants I've been collecting in the area around my home when I walk the dog. So for example, some very beautiful Silver Dollar. I love the colours that you see just in the leaves themselves. Those greyish browns. Totally beautiful. Good old onions. Onion skins, there you go, from the kitchen. And Banksias, what do you do with those? Yeah, you can boil those up. They'll give you a lovely warm brown colour. Really? To help me come to a decision on what colour to dye my scarf, we decided to take some of the plants Gina had gathered and experiment with the colours. So we've got all our materials, what next? Okay, we need a table in a well-ventilated area. Don't want to be doing this inside in the kitchen or anything like that. Here we've got a little electric hot plate or if you want the deluxe model, I have my very own old boiler. Like my grandmother had. You can certainly use old pots that you don't really want to use anymore in the kitchen when they get a bit, you know, past their use by date. And then glass jars are a great thing. Everyone's got some of these. Yeah, I collect all my glass jars from the kitchen. So now I'm going to take my secateurs and I'm going to chop it into little pieces so that the dye has more chance of coming out of the plant. And what about with a plant like this? Yeah, I would just break it up into little pieces. Put them in the jar? So now we're just filling them up with water so that it's just above the surface so that the plants can release their colour into the water. You can experiment with any of your plants so long as you know that they're not, you know, toxic. I mean, your herbs, you can eat them so they're not going to hurt you. A lot of your cottage plants give quite lovely colours. Bring the water to a boil and then let it simmer for about 45 minutes. This can vary depending on the plant material. Eucalyptus and barks can take a little bit longer. So it's been in for about an hour now and we're going to take them out and find all sorts of wonderful colours, hopefully. It really is exciting to see what's going to come out. You can see the red from the irisine there. Yep, yep. We've got some different reds coming through here. We're going to strain it in here. I like to use a bit of netting as well to catch the fine particles to separate it from the dye. Then I'll rinse out the jar and the plant nutter, I'll put it all in here and that will go in the compost huff. And then pour the clean liquid into the jar so that we can then dye our samples. Can you use any type of fabric or textile? Protein fibres work best with natural dyes. Protein fibres are fibres that have been made from animal based. So wool, silk, anything that comes from the animal that gives you your fibre, they have a really natural affinity with natural dyes. So here's my scarf. Now, looking at all these colours, they're really coming out. Now, which one do you think would suit? Costa, such a handsome man as you. I reckon you could get away with anything, from pink to yellow to green. So it's really your personal taste. I'm really captured by this eucalyptus nicolai bark. The tone is quite deep. And that's going to get stronger as we boil it up as well. So I think that's going to be a beautiful colour actually. Time to dip this in. That's right. We get to pop it in the pot and then we want to simmer it for about half an hour. Stick around because at the end of the show, I'll show you just how the scarf turned out. Earlier in the program, I visited a talented textile artist and together we made some great plant dyes. Well, have a look at what Gina and the eucalyptus nicolai bark have done to my scarf. I absolutely love it. But that's it for this...