Botanical Colors

Mordant Monday: All of those Alums?

For today’s Mordant Monday, We are revisiting a great question: All those alums?! You Asked: Hello, I am wondering if it is possible to use Ammonium Aluminum Sulfate for mordanting wool? I am finding this substance in the spice section ofthe grocery store. I can’t seem to find definitive information about this and I feel confused about all the different “alums” that exist. We answered: The different alum types are basically the same mineral but they are refined differently for different purposes using a variety of chemicals. They can look different, too. For protein fibers, aluminum potassium sulfate, aluminum sulfate … Read more

Mordant Monday: Wool Fibers Feel Weird

It’s winter, and many of us have taken up knitting and crocheting during the cooler weather. While I’m thinking about knitting, my mind wanders to mordanting (of course), and some of the questions we’ve received from curious dyers. This Mordant Monday, I thought I’d start with some common questions when mordanting changes the hand feel and quality of wool fibers. The natural dye process uses a lot of heat, and a fair amount of handling: stirring, squeezing, rinsing. It’s easy for wool to react to all of this and become rougher feeling, even felted! Check out this week’s Mordant … Read more

Mordant Monday: Questions from the mailbag

Here’s a round up of questions from the community! Do I need to rinse mordants before dyeing? We rinse aluminum potassium sulfate mordanted fibers lightly before proceeding to the dye pot. We rinse aluminum acetate mordanted fibers lightly after we’ve completed the calcium carbonate dunging step. We rinse aluminum sulfate and tannin mordanted fibers lightly after the aluminum sulfate step. We rinse aluminum triformate mordanted fibers after the mordant step. We rinse iron mordanted fibers well after the iron mordanting step. How do I increase the amount of mordant on something that’s already been previously mordanted? We’ve had good success … Read more

Mordant Monday with The Dogwood Dyer: Dyeing with Thanksgiving Leftovers!

We decided to bring back this incredible tutorial that Liz Spencer of the The Dogwood Dyer created for us! She knows food waste and is a master at turning what most would throw away, into things of beauty. We asked Liz Spencer, the driving force behind The Dogwood Dyer, if she could put together a how-to for us using onion skins. She came back to us with this Dyeing with Thanksgiving Leftovers: An Artful Approach to Onion Skins tutorial. If you follow Liz, you know she offers an amazing subscription called A Year In Natural Dyes. This month it’s all … Read more

Sunday Visit: From Plant to Pigment with Natalie Stopka

Natalie Stopka’s work lives at the confluence of artistry, ecology, and inquiry. A bookmaker and pigment artist attuned to the language of materials, she explores the cycles of growth, decay, and transformation through color coaxed from the natural world. Her studio practice feels like collaboration rather than control—an ongoing conversation between plant, hand, and time. In this week’s Sunday Visit, Natalie opens the doors to that world, where books are bound with patience, pigments ripen through experiment, and the intimacy of observation becomes a creative act in itself. Her new book, From Plant to Pigment, grew from years of teaching … Read more

White powder on a white circular ceramic tray

Mordant Monday: Easy mordanting for wool

Even as the weather cools and the days get shorter, we are still in the dye pots and love the ease of aluminum triformate for mordanting wool. Aluminum triformate is another alum mordant, and we’ve adapted a couple of recipes to create a mordant method that’s a little different than our standard hot water techniques. Very simply, we create a mordant container or bucket and mix the aluminum triformate mordant with cold water. We then use that bucket and add skeins of clean wool yarn to it and let it soak overnight or longer. Then, when we’re ready to use … Read more

Mordant Monday: Myrobalan Magic

This week’s tannin exploration focuses on Myrobalan. I changed it up a bit this week by using our mordanted cotton bandana 6-pack as the base for exploring myrobalan. The convenience was a pleasant surprise and the colors came out beautiful. Myrobalan is a traditional cellulose tannin pre-treatment and dye, and used in Ayurvedic and traditional medicine. It’s an important color and used frequently in India and Southeast Asia. Myrobalan imparts a light yellow on cotton with a subtle light brown undertone, making it an ideal foundation for color overdyeing, and indigo combinations. Like our other examples, when combined with other … Read more

Sunday Visit: The Incredible Amy Dufault

Amy we miss you so at Botanical Colors, so much we needed to have you back on our Interview series that you started. We would love to catch up with you and tell everyone what amazing projects you have been working on. So here goes it! Amy is a storyteller, writer, and consultant passionate about bioregionalism, textiles and protecting water. She brings together diverse perspectives that drive innovative environmental solutions. Her work sheds light on the challenges facing the textile industry but also the successes pioneered by designers, artisans, filmmakers, scientists and futurists committed to a more sustainable and equitable … Read more

Sunday Visit: William Ingram and Jean Howe of Threads of Life Bali

A little backstory from Kathy: I’ve known Jean and William for many years through their trunk shows held in Seattle, where they’d speak about their cultural and natural dye projects in Bali as well as bring an array of incredible traditional textiles to view and purchase. From the beginning, I was impressed how they always put the weavers and communities front and center to their work. The quality and breadth of the textiles is exceptional, and the Seattle Art Museum acquired a dozen pieces for the Ikat exhibition in 2023. We’re honored and excited to work with them for this … Read more

Mordant Monday: Chalk and Madder Experiment

I just finished teaching A Nerd’s Guide to Mordants online this past weekend where we discussed the idea of adding minerals to the dye bath to develop deeper color. This is a technique that we’ve used in the PNW as our water is not very highly mineralized. Now many of the water sources in the United States are from groundwater sources that contain minerals like calcium and magnesium, and sometimes iron, so it’s easy to get rich reds from madder extract with little effort. However in Seattle, the water source is from snowpack and not from groundwater, so it’s somewhat … Read more