Navajo Tea

Description

Navajo Tea (Thelesperma megapotamicum) also called cota or Hopi Tea is a traditional herbal medicine and dyestuff used by the Diné. The dried stems, fine leaves and blossoms yield a warm peach to rich orange-rust shade on wool and cotton. An iron mordant shifts the color to a warm brown.

The plant is used as a tea for ailments and is considered a blood purifier.  Our Navajo Tea has been stored in a non-food manner, so please do not use for medicine or for drinking.

For our samples, we used 1:1 Navajo Tea to wool gauze weight of fabric (meaning for every gram of fabric, we weighed out a gram of tea stems), added the tea to water, then heated the tea and water for about 45 minutes. NOTE:  You can cut the Navajo Tea into shorter pieces. After 45 minutes, we strained the dyestuff 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 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 Navajo tea stems have plenty of color in them and can be extracted with more water again.

Protein fibers such as wool achieve a lovely rich orange with an alum mordant, and a brown with an iron mordant.  Plant fibers such as cotton will be a lighter shade and may benefit from longer dye times.  Leftover dye baths may be used to dye additional mordanted fibers, or made into lake pigments, dried and stored for other art projects.

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.  This dye will contain thin stems and small dried flowers.