Curry powder and coffee

If you're wondering what these witchy brews are, they're effectively mini dye baths. For today's 'postcard' challenge I decided to mess about with natural dyes. I cut small pieces of calico and dropped them into these tubs of hot water and curry powder, coffee, raspberry herbal tea, brown onion skins and 'normal' tea.

After a long, hot soak I fished them out, dried and ironed them, and here's how they turned out.

You can see from the piece of undyed calico in the bottom right hand corner that the resulting dyes are subtle shades. They're restful colours compared to the harsher chemical dyes we've grown so used to. The least successful was the calico dyed with raspberry herbal tea. It seemed a very muddy pink, but even that looked okay once it was sewn. Onion skins, regular tea and coffee all gave similar browns, while I suppose it's the turmeric in the curry powder that gave such a good yellow.

The resulting 6 x 4 inch postcard reminded me of the colours of Neapolitan ice-cream.

I didn't use any kind of fixing agent for the natural dyes, so they'd hardly stand up to modern detergents or being put in a washing machine. But that's okay for the purpose of this little experiment.

It was a lot of fun seeing what colours would develop, and I want to try using plants from the hedgerow or my allotment. See if I could get some zingy greens or yellows.

It's a pity the calendula aren't in flower yet as they'd provide a vibrant orange. But there'll plenty of nettles around, and wouldn't they be good for green?

Looks like I'll be spending the coronation weekend doing something more interesting than watching a royal procession on telly, doesn't it?

(Nope, I'm definitely not a fan of royalty!)

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