Making Dye From Goldenrod Flowers
Oh goldenrod, how do I love thee? Too many ways to count! There are many varieties of goldenrod and all can be used to dye fiber beautiful yellow and gold colors. The flowers pictured here are Solidago canadensis and this is the variety I use to make dye since they grow natively in my region of the Pacific Northwest. Some flowers were harvested from plants I grow at Cedar Dell Forest Farm and others from a vacant lot in town.
They bloom in late summer and bees love them so watch out for them when you’re harvesting.
Preparing Your Fabric
The photos in this tutorial show silk fabric dyed with goldenrod but the same methods work with wool too. To prepare your fiber for dyeing with goldenrod (and most natural dyes), it needs to be mordanted. Mordanting fabric is the process of adding a compound that binds the dye to the fiber.
I mordant silk and wool with alum (potassium aluminum sulfate). You can purchase it at the grocery store in the spice isle, or from a natural dye supplier. See my description of using it in this blog post.
Harvesting Goldenrod
Harvest goldenrod when the flowers are bright yellow. If you wait too long, they start to look dull, then dry into little puffs of seeds. They can still be used at that point but the color will be less vibrant.
The flowers grow on little branches that radiate out from the top of the main stem. I use scissors and clip the main stem just at the base of the flowers. It’s okay if there are some leaves attached. I toss them all into a large stainless steel pot and cover with water.
Extracting the Color
To get the beautiful yellow color from the flowers, they need to be heated. Simmer the flowers in plenty of water for about an hour. Always use separate pots than you use for cooking food! Thrift stores are great places to find inexpensive pots for dyeing. It’s also best to do this outdoors if possible, or at least in a well ventilated area. It produces some strong odors.
I often leave my dye bath to sit overnight, or at least until the water cools, since the color will continue to leach out into the water. In the photos below, the first shows the color of the water soon after simmering and the second shows how it looked the next morning.
Dyeing Fiber
Sometimes I place the fiber directly into the pot as I am heating the goldenrod. This saves some time since it combines two steps. The downsides are that the flowers will get stuck in yarn or thread that you’re dyeing. They shake loose later but it can make a bit of a mess. If you dye fabric with this method, it can result in uneven color since the flowers are touching the fabric and the fabric cannot move around freely in the pot. Dye can’t penetrate into areas where the fabric is folded or bunched up so stirring it throughout the dye process is important.
The photos below show silk embroidery floss being dyed. I placed the thread in the pot after the flowers had been simmered. It had cooled a bit but was still warm when I put the thread in. You can see the fiber started to turn yellow almost immediately. They were left in the dye pot overnight and you can see in the second photo that both dye and silk thread are much darker yellow.
The fabrics in the photo below are silk habotai. When I dyed them I first strained the flowers out of the dye bath. I placed the fabric in and gently heated again, stirring the fabric to help it dye evenly. The brighter yellow was dyed first. The lighter yellow fabric was dyed after several other items so there was little dye left in the pot. The resulting color is a soft butter yellow.
There’s nothing wrong with fabric that’s dyed unevenly and sometimes it can be a desired outcome! The yellow silk below was dyed scrunched up in the dye pot with all the flowers and the resulting color is a beautiful, and subtle, abstract design of varying shades of yellow.
The brilliant blue of indigo makes it the perfect color to combine with other dyes. Goldenrod and indigo is one of my favorite pairings.
The green silk embroidery floss shown in this photo was dyed with both goldenrod and indigo. The light green was dipped once in my indigo vat and the darker green was dipped 3 or 4 times in the indigo dye to create a deeper, emerald green.
All three of these goldenrod-created colors are available in my shop!
I hope you find some goldenrod to dye with! It is such a beautiful plant and the colors it produces feel the color of the sun itself!
You can find all my natural dye tutorials by clicking here!
And, as always, you can see what I’m working on at the moment on social media.
