Reduce Food Waste with Vegetable Dyes

Any fiber geek loves their natural dyes, but have you ever thought you might be helping the planet with them? Learn how to reduce food waste with these vegetable dyes made right from your compost bin. No special materials, no expensive ingredients – just rummage around your kitchen to make these natural dyes. Plus, read our review of Natural Color by Sasha Duerr and be inspired to make even more vegetable dyes!

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In today’s article, we share how to use your kitchen waste and turn it into natural dyes for fiber projects. If you decide to join our newsletter, you can access our member library for free wherein you’ll find a number of worksheets and booklets on this general topic. One resource that might be helpful if you’re dealing with food waste is our Zero Food Waste Worksheets.

 
Even if you get through those worksheets, you will end up with food scraps when you cook at home. So, let’s discuss how you can reduce that food waste even further by making vegetable dyes!

Making Natural Vegetable Dyes

If you’ve moved away from commercial dyes for your textile or even food projects, then you may already be familiar with the natural dye making process. However, if you’re new to the idea of making vegetable dyes, you’ll want to gather a few basic materials.

Here are some tools to consider:

• Large stock pot that you can dedicate to your vegetable dye projects
• Long-handled spoon or wooden spurtle; you may also like some long tongs for removing materials from hot dye baths
• Scissors, notepad and pen for note-taking
• Scrap pieces of yarn or twine for tying up skeins
• Netted produce bags for dying loose fleece
• Several glass jars with lids for mixing and making mordants and modifiers
• Kitchen scale; I like digital scales the best
• Set of sieves or strainers; I like the ones with handles the best
• Air-drying apparatus like an outdoor laundry line, indoor drying rack, or a collection of hangers in a place you don’t mind drips and possible stains

Not necessary, but helpful:

• Yarn-winder
• Niddy Noddy

Also helpful is a good storage area for your naturally dyed yarns – like this yarn organization for the wall from Hearth Hooke Home.

Kids Love Their Vegetable Dyes!

No small aside is that this is a great project for families to enjoy. Don’t be afraid to get your kids and grandkids into the kitchen for natural dye experiments. The natural dye process can certainly be made safe for children with a little common sense.

For example, the kids can handle peeling onion skins and washing spinach leaves while you prepare the mordants that might be necessary for the each project.

Along with yarn, we died several white cotton cloves so that we could make more of our favorite glove animals. 

A lot of what we do as grown-up mentors for the young is to simply share our personal way of being. Reducing food waste, living abundantly and eating your vegetables are all messages we want to deliberately share with the kids in our lives.

The more your children play around with vegetable dyes, the more they just might enjoy eating those vegetables!

Reducing Food Waste with Vegetable Dyes

If you cook at home with fresh vegetables, you’ve likely discovered how much food waste can be produced from just one meal preparation. From beet tops to onions skins to avocado pits, the vegetable waste can pile up.

We can always compost food waste. If you’re new to composting, Attainable Sustainable shares a beginners guide to composting. Small Footprint Family even has a list of 100 things you can compost.

However, before you reach for that counter-top compost bin, consider these simple ideas for making vegetable dyes from your food waste. After you’re done boiling them for their fabulous vegetable dye color, then you can compost them with peace of mind.

You can know that you gave them a second chance at life! As Sasha Duerr writes in her gorgeous plant-based dye book, Natural Color,

“Working with plant color is one of the easiest and most accessible ways of connecting with the cycle of our ecologies and applying that knowledge directly to your design practice – you can begin with the wayward white wool sweater in the back of your closet that you haven’t worn and the leftover by-products of your favorite meal before they hit the compost pile.”

Onion Skin Vegetable Dye

If you cook at home, you’re bound to end up with onion skins on a continual basis. Both yellow and purple onion skins can be used for natural vegetable dyes.

Onion skins are one of my favorite vegetable dye sources because they’re so easy to use. You don’t need a mordant for simple projects because the skins have naturally occurring tannin.

A little lingo: A dye mordant, or dye fixative, is a substance used to set (bind) dyes on fabrics and fibers making them colorfast. Here’s a good overview of mordants for natural dyes.

More lingo: Colorfast dyes are those that keep their color even with laundering.

Here is a fantastic onion skin dye tutorial from The Herbeevore. Onion skins really only need to be boiled to be used as a natural dye. Please pay special to her caution about adding fibers to boiling water!!

You’re not limited to fibers with these natural dye experiments, FYI. Here’s how we used onion skins to make one of our favorite natural dye colors for Easter eggs.

Beet Top Vegetable Dyes

Along with onion skins, beet tops are commonly used by beginner vegetable dye enthusiasts. They’re easy to use and produce an amazingly bright pink color for foods and fiber.

Like onion skins, beets are fun to use for craft fibers and child craft activities because they’re safe and non-toxic. Our Everyday Life can teach you how to make a dye with beet juice.

There’s a little drawback for both, though – neither onion skins or beets are colorfast on natural fibers. This is also called fugitive color, and it means that the color will fade over time.

Beet will fade entirely over time; onion skins will fade to a lovely pale, yellowish-orange.

• Here’s a great article from Wearing Woad on natural dyes that are not colorfast (aka, fugitive color). 

That’s not to discourage you from using them as vegetable dyes. They’re wonderfully effective for foods and crafts – even Easter eggs!

Never be afraid to experiment with vegetable dyes. Here are some off our homeschool natural dye experiments to inspire you.

• Natural Color can educate you in all the natural dye vocabulary you’ll need to know. Duerr clearly explains mordants, modifiers, and everything in between.

She can help you learn how to ensure that your natural dyes are colorfast and versatile. That’s one of the neat things about the book – all the different kinds of projects!

Spinach Leaf Vegetable Dyes

Finding a good green dye can be tricky, even for the experienced natural dyer. If you have spinach leaves on hand, though, give this tutorial using spinach to naturally dye wool from Janet at Timber Creek Farm.

Janet uses her beautiful home-grown wool to experiment with; be sure to check out her yarn shop. Don’t drool on your laptop, though.

Avocado Pit Vegetable Dye

I saved one of my most recent favorite vegetable dyes for last – avocado pits!

Who doesn’t look at a proud avocado pit and wonder if there might not just be something else you could do with besides tossing it in the garbage or compost bin?

When Blogging for Books sent me a review copy of Natural Color I was immediately drawn to dyeing with avocado pits. We eat so many avocados and the kids are always up for a fun time.

So, here’s what we did to use avocado pits to make a natural dye, following the instruction from Natural Color closely.

How to Make Avocado Pit Vegetable Dye

Avocado pits will make several lovely shades of pink, and purple with an iron solution, or modifier. Depending on how long you soak your fibers, how concentrated your dye bath and which fibers you use, your colors will vary.

That’s actually one of the neatest parts about natural dyes. As Sasha Duerr writes in Natural Color,

“They are so complex. If you think about the biodiversity of taste, which makes us healthier and helps us evolve—I feel similarly about the biodiversity of color.”

Avocado Pit Dye Notes

Use natural fibers for best results – cotton or wool. Bamboo will also work, as will silk and dog hair.

Synthetic fibers like nylon yield spotty results. Sometimes they’ll take color (or at least some color), and sometimes they won’t.

Experiment with an iron mordant to get a purple color. We linked some mordant instructions above, but here are a few more good tutorials.

• How to Mordant Before Natural Dyeing, by The Barefoot Dyer – which is a great site for natural dyeing!
• DIY Iron Modifier, by Salt in My Coffee – which is a generally great site for lots of cool stuff!

Natural Color – a Great Resource for Natural Dyes!

I’ve really enjoyed my time delving into Natural Colors and can absolutely recommend it for natural dye enthusiasts.

Duerr really does see natural dyes as a way to connect ourselves back to nature and feel close the its rhythms and needs. In fact, the section where you’ll find the avocado pit natural dye instructions are entitled, “Creating Color From Compost.”

Here are a few of my favorite highlights from Natural Color:

1. The projects are organized by season, which I really appreciated as a homeschooler. We did, indeed, use this book for several school projects.
2. Duerr gives quality instruction that is clear and compelling. She also suggests a wide array of projects so that, if one doesn’t appeal to you, others will.
3. She gives clear materials lists and nothing is too pricey or odd. You know what I mean – some projects are just too hoity-toity for their own good and you never end up doing them.
4. The photos are luscious! They are simply inspiring and encouraged us to try the projects.
5. No good book can rest only on pictures, of course. The text is also clear and compelling – the writing is good. I especially enjoyed her personal stories in the preface materials.

So, save the planet and try these vegetable dyes to reduce food waste and increase the fun in your family! You’ll want a good book, so pick up your own copy of Natural Color.

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