I Tried to Plant Dye with Walnut and Madder

Oh, this is way too much fabric. This makes me so terrified! Hello, and welcome to this video. This suddenly felt like it turned out to be a cooking channel. It's not. I have a eating cat here. But it's not. Keep calm. It's going to be sewing related, or more textile related. I can at least tell you that it's going to be a highly requested video. Yesterday I walked in a secondhand shop, and I found a wool fabric, which was a real bargain. I got very happy. I think this is like what we in Sweden call Vandmal. And to be honest, that's a fabric that I don't really love. I think it will fit perfectly to a project that I want to do, so I'm still really really happy about it. But this is white. It's undyed, and we can't have that. So I need to dye this. The first synthetic dyes was invented in the 1850s. But people have been dyeing their clothes and different textiles for longer than that. But instead of synthetic dyes, they use natural dyes. They use dyes based on plants. And I think this is very very fascinating when you think about it. I mean, when you look into manuscripts and all the cartons there, everything is plant dyed. When you look at an 18th century court gown, it's plant dyed. And I think that's so cool, and you get these bright colors all from black to pink to purple to yellow. You have basically the whole color spectrum just with the help of natural dyes with plants and things you found in nature. That's so cool. So what did they use then? Well, plants that we know was used for dyeing with was Weld, which gives you a yellow color, and I used that for my yellow dress. They used madder, which gives you a red color, which was used in the coloring of my red kettle. They used indigo and woad to achieve a blue color, and they also used walnut to achieve a brown color, which is what I'm going to do today. And I know that brown might be one of the more boring colors of the ones I told you, but don't be too sure about that, because the process might be a bit interesting. When you're talking about plant dyes, you also quite often include cochineal. Cochineal? Yeah, that's basically a lice, which gives you a red-pinkish-purple color, which is very, very beautiful. I don't really know why you include that in plant dyes, but it's quite often the case, so... Okay, so here we have the walnuts. I picked them up at my grandparent's house, and now they've been traveling in a car for like eight hours, and then been out in the weather for a week, so they're not really that beautiful anymore. And the thing that I'm going to do now is that I'm going to remove the hard nut that's in here. This is like a fruity gel around the hard nuts that we in Sweden at least eat on Christmas. I don't know if you do it while you live, but we does that anyway. Oh, and I heard somewhere that you're going to use gloves when handling these, which I've not been. Yeah, so I think I'm going to fetch a pair now. Oh, and another thing. This whole thing is a total experiment. I know that you've heard this a couple of times from me before, but I want to say it again. I'm not an expert, especially not in plant dyeing. I just hope that I will have a lot of luck in this. I've just done this two times before, as I said, with Weld and Matter, and those times have been turning out well. But then I had to have much help and also clear instructions, which I'm not having today. So I cannot assure you that I will do things wrong in this process. And I also know that there are a lot of you that are better than me in this. But please, when you're giving me tips and tricks on how to make this better, do it in a kind way, because I know that I'm not good at this. I'm not claiming to be an expert. I'm not claiming to know what I'm doing. So please, when you're commenting down below here, do it in a kind way. I'm doing my best. All right, where was I? Gloves. Now. So I think the plan is to cut them up, take out the nuts, place them into a pot, and then fill it up with water. I understand now why you should have gloves when doing this. It was extremely dirty, and I got brown and yellow stains everywhere, including my hands, which now looks like I'm dying of some kind of deadly disease. All the shells are here anyway, and now I'm going to cook them for two whole hours. I'm afraid that my pot is way too small, which is the problem always when I'm trying to plant dye. I don't have a pot that is big enough for plant dyeing, which needs liters and liters and liters of water. This is five liters. That's way too small, but I hope that's enough when I'm cooking my shells. But I will certainly need more water later when I'm going to add the fabric. I hope this is enough for now. Okay, let's move it to the stove and turn it on. And I love how it has slowly turned from green into black. Yeah, deep brown in a way. You know, it looks a bit like blood soup or something very rotten that you shouldn't eat. But I think one thing is sure, and that is that I need to find another bigger pot to put this in the fabric in. But as I said, I'm afraid that that's going to be too small as well, but I hope that this will work. Otherwise, I don't know what to do. This is 10 liters. This is 10 liters, and I think that, if I remember correctly, for 100 grams of fabric you need three to five liters of water. So this means that I need around 15 to 25 liters for this. Or I think so. I mean, this is one meter. We can check that out actually. Okay, let's see. Hi. I want you too. Oh, it's hard to see. But yeah, somewhere around 500 grams, which means that I would need 15 to 25 liters of water, which doesn't fit in here. There's no way. This is always the problem when I'm trying to plan a time. Always. I mean, I could solve this in different ways. One way is that I could divide the bath into two and then divide this into as well. But the problem might be that the color will turn out in different shades in the different baths. And the other one is that I could try to fit the fabric into this, but use a smaller amount of water. But that could also be problematic since, I mean, that could make the fabric color uneven and you can have a lot of stains and, well, not a very pleasant result. So that's quite scary. But I think that might be the best solution. I mean, I could try to stir all the time to minimize that risk, but it is scary. It really is. I'm going to take this bath now and try to take away these bits of walnut shells that are left. But we don't want them into our bath. That could destroy the whole color. So I think I will need one of these. Is this okay? Hope so. Gosh, this is heavy. Okay, I think I will put the fabric in first. Because you want the fabric and the water to be a similar temperature, in the beginning at least. I don't think that they are now, but it's better than having this boiling and this like 20 degrees. Okay, should I put it down? I feel like it will take color immediately. Oh, this is way too much fabric. This makes me so terrified. Okay, I just put it down here. Are you ready? Oh my god, it will... Okay, no, no, I need to take away some water because it's coming over. Does this work? Okay, I think that this will work. Okay, this is fine now. Okay, I will just move it to the stove. I remember now that this pot doesn't work on this stove. Okay! Another plan. Oh god, oh gosh, it's raining as well. Yeah, nice. Stove! No stove. Stove? No stove. Stove? No stove. Stove? No stove. This makes me so incredibly frustrated. I want... Oh, I found the stove! I can't really go around with a stove in one hand. Okay, yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, door. I have a stove now. Wow, what an adventure. If I just could turn it on... Well, let's try and see how this goes. Okay, so now I'm going to cook this for as long as I want until I'm happy with the color, but I want it to come up to like 70 to 90 degrees. I can just feel how unhealthy this will be. We thought I would be down here. Well, I don't think I am. I mean, it's nothing wrong with the color. I think it's not great, but it is a very natural and cold and very kind brown. But I think that a little bit of red would do the trick. That is what I will try today. And for a red color you need, if you remember, madder. And this is my little box of madder. I bought it online and I got it as a powder. I don't know if you can see, but there's red powder in there. So this is grounded and I know that you also can buy madder as a whole. And I would think that that works fine as well, but this is what I have and this is a bit simpler. So I will go with this. And what I actually got this time, in difference to the walnut, is instructions! This is a recipe for 100 grams. And as we know, my fabric is 500. So everything in this we will take and multiply with 5 and then we will hope that that works okay. 40 grams per 100 grams of fabric. So 40 multiply with 5. 200. And we must remember that that means that 200 will lead to a quite strong color and I don't think that that is something that I am striving for. I think that I want a more muted color. Should we take 100 or 150 grams? Somewhere around that, I think. I've done this before, as I said, but I've never over dyed with madder. And if you don't know what over dyeing is, that's exactly what I'm doing right now. So that's where I have already a color and I make another bath to change that color. And they use that in historical periods to achieve you know, greens and purples and you know, shades between colors. If you want to dye green, for example, you take, for example, indigo and weld. And I don't really remember which bath you should take first, but no, blue and yellow and that makes green. And I don't know what shade this will turn out to be. I have no idea. Will it be a muted red or some kind of orange color or a warm brown? I don't know. So this is, as always with plant dyeing, very exciting. Okay, should we weigh this? This is actually just 130 grams and that would be quite nice. Yeah, I think I should take everything. Take 40 grams with madder. I'm trying to translate this to English while I'm reading. And take hot water and make a thin batter. Okay. Make a thin batter of madder. That's That's a good line. They said warm water and not hot. So I don't think I want this to be boiling or anything. Okay, this is quite hot now. So I think that's good. And now I just need to find a bowl or anything. Wait. For some reason this coffee tastes like madder smells. Okay, I need to find a bowl. Something like this maybe. No, I think it's a battery batter. Okay, so now I will leave this for a couple of hours. They said overnight in the instructions, but I don't think I will wait that long. So I'll see you in a couple of hours. So it has been a couple of hours now. I think around four or five hours or something. And I know that that isn't enough, but when I did my red kettle I had the exact same problem and four or five hours worked well. I will go with this now. And the next step in the instructions says pour it over to the dying pot. Fill it up with as much water as you will need later on when you die. And we all know what that meant. 3 to 5 liters per 100 grams of fabric. So 15 to 25 liters of water. Hello, my 10 liters dying pot. Just breathe, Elin. It will be okay. It has now reached 70 degrees. And we don't want it to go higher than that. And that's really important because if it goes higher than that it will begin to turn brown. And we don't want that. So keep it under 70 degrees for as I said, at least an hour. It has now been an hour and the bath is ready. Okay. Do you want to see the result? Okay, look at this. Look at this beautiful color. It's very hard to describe it. You know, it's brown but at the same time it's some kind of warm orange, you know, you can see a lot of red. But at the same time the baths are not pink. So you can clearly see some kind of warm pink in here. And I mean, this is the kind of color that you cannot buy. Which is one of the things that I think is so fun with plantain. And also you have no idea what color you will have at the end. And I got this, which was far better than my expectations. I just think this will be perfect for my project. Absolutely perfect. And I mean, when you think about the circumstances when dyeing this, I think the color turned out very very even. And I know that it isn't a very bright or fancy color. I mean, it's not like red or brown, but I am one of those that love those strange in-between shades. So yeah, this was very very fun. And I really really hope you thought the same. And if you are interested in more content like this, like plantain, please let me know. And I hope I see you very very soon, because interesting things will happen here very soon.