dyeing fabrics with red onions

Von treches am 14. Aug. 2009

I were, really, close to giving up on the whole ‘dyeing with food-colours’- project, when I decided to make one last attempt after reading about dyeing with red onions in an old ‘tips and tricks’-book…
(Since my last post about dyeing I’ve been trying out the sodium carbonate and also “urea” which should make the colour stronger -but without ANY success! :( -so seriously: dyeing with beetroot is NOT possible! believe me! I’ve tried too many times now!..)

anyway: here’s a dyeing-experiment that actually worked out!!:::

I collected the skin/peelings from about three red onions.
(what’s good about this ‘source of dye’ is that you could keep it for ages -and collect the skins every time you use red onions for cooking. Cause if you want to dye big pieces of fabric you’re going to need a lot! -my three onions was enough for about 200g of fabric (means 1/2 t-shirt..)

I don’t know if this is really making any difference: I soaked the fabrics in sodium carbonate (“soda”)-water-mix with a pH of 11. This is to prepare the fibers to take up the dye..

cooking the peelings for about twenty minutes -the colour changes from dark purple to dark brown -a quite disgusting one..
Then I filtered the skins out.

Here I’ve added the fabric and let it boil for another 15 minutes (So if you have a new t-shirt you want to dye, it’s probably going to shrink!)
Afterwards, I rinsed out the fabric with cold water.
..As usual (!!!) most of the dye goes out, but this time…

..the fabric keeps some of the colour!!! (jippie!)
What you see on this picture is (from right): dyeing with beetroot-pieces (didn’t work..), dyeing with beetroot-”juice” (also didn’t work) and, on the left: dyeing with red onions!!!
-yes, well, the colour is not really a strong one, but it’s at least something!
..And, I believe, with the skin of some twenty onions, it would be strong yellow/brownish!

(Unfortunately, I’m not really into yellow this season.. maybe next year… ;))

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