Tutorial – Natural Food Colouring

While preparing the CMYK Dinner we thought it would be interesting to experiment a bit with natural food colours. It’s nothing new, here in Italy it’s a tradition to colour eggs for Easter by boiling them in food colour. We thought it could be interesting to try and colour some fabric, in this case cotton and for our Fork n’Flowers event we coloured Jute.  What follows is a graphic and somewhat simple overview of the process. We hope to soon post more detailed and useful information on colouring with natural dyes.

The quantity of ingredients necessary varies allot depending on the ammount of water used and the ammount of fabric you need to colour.

Once you’ve boiled the ingredients for half an hour use a sieve to remove the solid parts, careful not to throw away all that precious dye you’ve extracted.

Turmeric is an extremely strong dye, and once you’ve boiled your cotton for twenty minutes it won’t fade much. Cabbage on the other hand, although initially being very bright has problems bonding  to the material. This means that if you rinse it under cold water it will loose colour and fade. An interesting effect is that the more it fades the more the colour goes from a bold purple to a light blue. And in case you were wondering, YES it does stink of boiled cabbage.