In A New Coat for Anna, Anna and her mother color the wool yarn for her coat with a dye they make from lingonberries. To finish up our study of the book, we decided to try some natural dyeing projects of our own. Our instructions came from a great book called Berry Smudges and Leaf Prints
Lingonberries are not easy to find in Maryland unless you go to Ikea. However, cranberries make an excellent substitute. Michael and Alex simmered them for quite some time over low heat, and then let them rest in the fridge overnight.
They also saved the remnants of a pot of coffee, to make a brown dye. In the morning, we strained the cranberries and added a little vinegar to each dye. Observant Alex noted that they now smelled like Easter egg dye.
We heated the dyes back to a simmer and added some lengths of plain cotton butcher’s string. After about half an hour, both samples had picked up some lovely color.
The color faded quite a bit when we rinsed off the excess dye, but the string that was in the cranberry dye has retained a lovely dark pink shade. The coffee dye is a more disappointing light tan. It was just leftover coffee from a drinking pot; if we do this again, I’d want to brew it extra strong and then boil it down to concentrate the color a bit more.
This was a really enjoyable activity, and surprisingly easy. I’d love to get the natural dyes book again in summer and experiment at greater length with different substances and dyeing methods.
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Sounds like a really fun activity! I’ll have to try it sometime.
Try onion skins. My Croatian grandfather always dyed Easter eggs with these.
Coffee, onion skins, turmeric, red beets etc. make great items for dye. It is really great that you are doing this with your children. I started experimenting a couple years ago dying my own Easter eggs. I don’t like to use artificial dyes when I make Easter bread etc. I was surprised out how good the eggs come out.