Natural Dye for Eco-Friendly Creations

Updated July 2025

By Anita Gastaldo

I’m perpetually amazed at the human drive to create beauty. Our hunting and gathering ancestors took the time out of their daily struggle for survival to craft beads and grind pigments for paint. Archaeologists have found evidence of dyed textiles back to the Stone Age, and Chinese natural dye traditions date back more than 5,000 years. People have been dyeing with indigo for thousands of years in South America, Africa, and South and East Asia.

While modern science has developed pigments that make dyeing cheaper, faster, and more consistent, many makers find themselves drawn to relearning the old ways of creating beautiful hand-dyed textiles with flowers, bark, and even ground-up insects.  

Unfortunately, as with many craft practices, there’s a ton of misinformation about natural dyeing floating around on the Internet. Although there are plenty of ways to stain textiles, it’s often a complicated process to create vivid, lasting hues with natural dyes. Most dyes require treating your fabric with a mordant (from the Latin verb mordere, meaning “to bite”), which allows the dye molecules to bond permanently with the fabric. Dyes also can be sensitive to the temperature or pH of the water you use, or, in order to get saturated colors, can require precise ratios of dye stuff to fabrics. 

If you’re wondering about how to get started with natural dyeing at home, we’ve collected our best advice for you.

Sustainable Tips for Natural Dye

Use What You Have

Do you have old pots and utensils taking up kitchen real estate but never being used? Dust those off the shelves and repurpose them as new tools for natural dye projects.

Don’t throw away your kitchen scraps! Onion skins, avocado pits and skins, and coffee grounds can all be used to dye fabric, but you often need a lot to get a good color. Many home dyers keep a giant ziplock bag in the freezer to save up scraps until they are ready to dye. 

Shop Smart

Thrift stores are your friend. You should have dedicated pots and utensils for dyeing that you don’t use for food. Thrift stores are filled with cheap, stainless steel kitchen equipment to help you get started without spending a ton of money. 

Often, it can be easier to get started with natural dye by working with materials that have already been dried and ground for you, and are ready to start dyeing. Dependable natural dye suppliers will not only sell you high-quality ingredients but should also supply you with well-tested recipes and instructions for dyeing at home. I love Dharma Trading, Maiwa, and Botanical Colors for their dye supplies and information. 

At Sew to Speak, we also carry some wonderful dye kits to get you started on your dye journey!

Photo by Ben Lindbloom taken from Botanical Colors, experts in natural dye

Cultivating a Natural Dye Garden

Janette Knowles, PhD, is chair of the Art and Design Program at Ohio Dominican University as well as the Director of ODU’s Wehrle Gallery and Co-Founder of Nursery Lane Studios. She has been cultivating a natural dye garden for almost 20 years and is a wealth of information on the topic. This next section was written by Janette.

With current events ongoing in the world, I often find myself thinking about our relationship with nature and the environment, and, more specifically, about my relationship with my own soil and instilling a sense of the importance of cultivating that soil in the next generation. 

In 2020, during the pandemic, when many of us had to start making sourdough bread because we couldn’t find loaves, we talked about the potential for other shortages. Eventually, the conversations led to WWII Victory Gardens, where every bit of land, garden, and balcony was turned to food production. My thoughts turned to my dye garden and its expansion.

I could use my dye garden not just to create my own textiles, but to teach the community that we can push back against the environmental horrors (and I do not use that term lightly) of the fast fashion industry that pollutes air, water, and land. And by teaching people about the cultivation of their own dye gardens, I can connect people to their own geography, their own ecosystem, and their own communities. This is connected, in a way, to the ancient concept of the “genius loci,” or the spirit of the place. Isn’t that a wonderful idea?

My natural dye garden is my commitment to regenerative practices that use, celebrate, and renew the earth. And it is my small bit to undo the corporate destruction of the environment.

When someone pops homegrown marigolds into the vat, they are doing the same thing that traditionally, women did throughout history. In English texts, we read of the “pot marigold,” so-called because it was put in the cooking pots as a substitute for saffron to color cakes, butter, and puddings; it was also used for broths and dye. The 16th-century herbalist, William Turner, sternly explained: “Some use to make their heyre yellow with the floure of this herb, not being content with the naturall colour which God hath given them.”

In 1916, a renowned weaver and dyer named Ethel Mairet published A Book on Vegetable Dyes. In it, she wrote: “DYEING has almost ceased to exist as a traditional art. In the 20th century, the importance of colour in our lives seems to be realized less and less. It has been forgotten that strong and beautiful colour, such as used to abound in all everyday things, is essential to the full joy of life.”

When I harvest my madder root, I think of the fact that I am doing exactly what women did in Israel and Egypt and China and Peru and Turkey between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago, where some of our earliest archaeological evidence of textile dyeing comes from. I’d also like to see the act of this cultivation, harvest, and use as a sign of my commitment to my “place,” my soil, my world. 

Marigolds are easy to grow and produce a rich natural dye.

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