Wednesday 31 March 2010
NATURAL DYEING WITH TEA LEAVES
Tea is probably one of the most readily available dyestuffs and one that we have used several times in the past.. Tea contains tannin, which stains and colours giving good lightfast properties. We used alum as a mordant on these raw silk shawls, using 10% of the fabrics weight to gauge the amount of alum required. For this experiment we used enough tea leaves to match the weight of the fabric. Different quantities of tea can be used to adjust the strength of the dyebath. Pictured below are our results from a recent dyebath.
