Tea dyeing experiment

I’ve been reading a lot of books and blogs about dyeing fabric with plants lately, and I wanted to do a little experiment. But chemical mordants seemed a bit complicated and scary, and I don’t yet have a dedicated saucepan just for dyeing, and I wanted to get started straight away. So, inspired by Tiina Teaspoon, I decided to start with tea!

Tiina recommends freezing your used teabags until you’ve got enough to dye with, which I’m going to start doing from now on, but tucked away in the back of the cupboard I knew I already had a box of decaffeinated tea bags that had gone out of date. I started with 16g of dry fabric (silk paj, cotton muslin, bamboo and silk dupion) and 17g of tea, or five tea bags.

I filled a saucepan with hot water, and simmered the tea bags for an hour. Our water here is very hard and full of lime, and there was a lot of scum on the top of the tea. I did wonder whether I should have used distilled water, but not having any to hand, tap it had to be. I took out the tea bags before adding the fabric. All of the fabrics had previously been through the washing machine to remove any starches or other treatments left over from the manufacturing process (including the silk), and I soaked them in warm water before putting them into the tea.

The resulting brew was very dark, and the fabric began to take up the colour immediately. If I just wanted to dull down a piece of cotton, or create an “antique” look, I wouldn’t have needed to do much more than just dip the fabrics into the tea.

In the end I let the pot simmer for another hour, by which time almost all of the water had evaporated. Possibly I should have left the lid on the pot, and turned the temperature down even lower. The water really only needs to be kept hot for this, not actually boiling. After the hour I turned off the heat and left the fabrics in the tea dye to cool down. I kept stirring the fabrics around throughout the entire process, maybe every fifteen to twenty minutes or so. (Every time I walked through the kitchen. I wasn’t very precise about it!)

From left to right: bamboo, silk paj, cotton muslin, silk dupion

I rinsed the fabrics under the shower until the water ran clear, which was actually very quickly. I didn’t use any detergents, just warm water. I knew the cellulose fibres (bamboo & cotton) would take the colour differently from the protein (silk) ones, but I’m suprised at the depth of colour and the variations between them all. The fabrics are still a little bit damp in this photo, so the dupion has dried a little bit paler, but the two silks have kept their shine, and the colours are just lovely.

I’m now on the lookout for more plant dyes that can be used without any additional chemicals to fix the colour or release the dye. In the meantime I have plenty of tea in the house, so I can feel an experiment coming on!