Hopi Black Sunflower Dye

Description

Hopi Black Sunflower Dye (Helianthus annuus) is a traditional indigenous dye color used for baskets and wool dyeing.  Our sunflower seeds came from a grower in central Washington, and they are gorgeous. Inky and full of pigment, we were thrilled at the beautiful smoky blue gray produced on wool gauze fabric.

For our samples, we used 1:1 sunflower seeds to wool gauze weight of fabric (meaning for every gram of fabric, we weighed out a gram of seeds), added the seeds to water, then heated the seeds and water for about 45 minutes. After that, we strained the seeds out of the dye bath, kept the liquid and added wool gauze to the liquid, which was our dye bath.  We dyed for about 1 hour, then let the fabric cool and steep in the dye bath overnight.  Please note that we usually recommend longer times for obtaining darker shades, but we saw how strong this dyestuff was and shortened our dye times.  The leftover sunflower seeds have plenty of color in them and can be extracted with more water again.

Protein fibers such as wool achieve a gray to gray blue, and some dyers report getting a muted lilac.  Plant fibers such as cotton will be a lighter shade and may benefit from longer dye times.

The wool was mordanted at 15% aluminum potassium sulfate, and the darker wool sample was mordanted with iron only, at 2%.  Check our instructions for iron mordant and for mordanting with aluminum potassium sulfate.

Sold in 50 gram packages

NOTE: If you want to grow your own sunflowers next year, check out the offerings from Grand Prismatic Seed, a highly respected dye seed supplier. They offer high quality Hopi Black Sunflower seeds for sale. Grand Prismatic donates 50% of the proceeds of this dye seed to indigenous Hopi Tutskwa Permaculture, a non-profit focused on education, land stewardship and self-reliance within their community.