Dyeing cloth with avocado
We enjoy living in avocado land, and eat them most days. We’ve been trying to sprout the seeds, turning them into buttons, and eating them - but what to do with all those skins?
I’ve been saving them in a big bag in the freezer, and finally, we scraped them as clean as we could, cut them into little pieces, and soaked them for days. We boiled them occasionally, too.
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We cut up pits, soaking and boiling them, too. You can see the promise of color in the cuts - and then look at that vibrant hue! Much brighter than the skins.
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I’d read that I wouldn’t need a mordant because avocado has a dye-fixer naturally built-in. Well, good, even easier! I could just soak fabric in the liquid (with pits and skins or without), occasionally boil, soak a few more days, and have dyed cloth.
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Initial results were…okay. The cloth is a cotton/polyester blend, but perhaps 70/30 so a reasonable candidate for botanical dye. It was free, and I found a lot of it, which made it an ideal candidate for my first try. (I also tried wool yarn.)
The pre-dye color was like unbleached muslin, light taupe. Post-dye color was warm-pink-orange; prettier than the original cloth, borderline special enough for the effort.
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And after a soapless wash there was too little color left for the project to be worth it. Next, I’ll try a mordant. And I should have put far less cloth in each pot, but I was being lazy in that way that costs extra time in the long run.
