Foraging for Dye Materials is Easier Than You Think

There’s nothing more satisfying than harvesting materials for your own dye project. After all, plants are all around us! Whether you live near the woods or in the city, there are plenty of ways to gather plants you need for your next dyeing adventure.

The process of gathering dye plants from your area (or even neighborhood!) involves a few simple steps to get started. Similar to looking around your house for art supplies you need for a creative project, all it takes is a little know how and some urban or forest scouting.

Dye plants literally grow all around us, whether it’s in the middle of a forest, near a park, or even on the side of the road. The great thing about dye plants is that a lot of them are weeds, and in addition, a lot of weeds will yield color on fabric. So in that way it’s very easy to pick some plants and get started dyeing right away! You can use a plant ID app on your phone to identify plants you pick and then figure out if they make some sort of fantastic color.

In addition to downloading a plant ID app onto my phone, it’s been super helpful for me to keep an ongoing list of the plants that I find and where I’ve found them. I like to walk around the city a lot, and I keep an eye out for any dye plants that are accessible (aka not in someone’s garden or in a protected area), then note the place I found them—often with cross streets or some other specific information—in the notes app on my phone. That way I have my own list of places to find plants I can dye with, and can come back to those spots any time I need a fix of that particular color.

I would also highly suggest getting to know your dye plants by purchasing a few books. Here are two that are especially helpful to me, especially when it comes to foraging.

This is a little book on North American dye plants I found at a thrift store! It lists dye plants you can find in North America (obviously), along with black and white drawings of the plant, general information about the plant, and the colors you can yield from it on fabric with different applications. It’s small enough to carry around with you, almost like a pocket guide!

Another book I love is Harvesting Color by Rebecca Burgess. She is a wonderful dyer who works with wool, but the processes she describes in the book can be applied to any type of fabric.

What’s super helpful about this book is that it the featured plants are separated by season. There are beautiful photographs of the plant and the color(s) it makes on fabric and yarn. In addition, there are helpful maps with shaded in areas of where the plant can be found so you can tailor your search to the specific region you are in.

I love this book because it’s so well done and gorgeous, and it provides me with endless inspiration for my next dye project.

Okay—now to the fun part! You’ve read the books, no you’re ready to move on to the next step. In order to harvest your dye materials, you really need to get to know your area. Take walks around your neighborhood and keep a sharp eye out for any plants. If a plant catches your gaze because it looks interesting, or you’re just curious, whip out your phone and load up your plant ID app. If you already know what you’re looking for, it can be very exciting to see the plant in real life!

Here are some examples of dye plants I’ve found in my area.

These are cosmos and coreopsis flowers, two of my favorites! I found these growing in a sidewalk garden on a very busy street, and I took a few of them for myself. These flowers are perfect for dyeing because they can be made into a dye bath for all-over color, or printed onto the fabric to give the impression of the flower itself.

Introducing, pokeberry! This is a fun dye plant because it’s literally an invasive weed. The plant doesn’t really have any other use, so people will generally not care if you pick some for yourself (again, don’t go into someone’s garden!!). I found these along a walking path in my neighborhood. Since the plant is a weed, it literally grows like one, and in the late summer there are an abundance of these berries. There is a nice section in Harvesting Color that features this plant and the beautiful rich purple and pink colors you can achieve with the berries.

This is goldenrod, another of my all-time favorites. This flower is plentiful in late summer and early fall, and yields a gorgeous bright yellow color on fabric. I found this bundle growing next to a gas station! Yes, you read that right. I took plenty for myself because it was growing out of the sidewalk next to a place of business that clearly had no use for it.

Finally, a truly perfect foraging opportunity, with plants like osage orange (pictured above) or black walnuts. These are both fruiting bodies of trees that fall to the ground in very late summer/early fall. Once you have identified an area where there are either type of tree, you can easily harvest the dye plants from the ground with absolutely no harm done!

Now that we’ve covered resources, getting to know your plants, and figuring out places to find them, let’s talk about keeping track of what you find.

When you’re experimenting with dye plants, it’s really helpful to keep a dye journal. You can use a notebook (I am a notebook addict, so I always have extras lying around) and any scrap fabric you have—even old sheets will do. The most important thing is to make a small dye bath with your foraged plant, dye a small piece of fabric and record it in your journal.

This way it’s easy to keep track of the plants you’ve already experimented with and to keep a record of all your work. For me, it’s really fun looking back at my dye journal every once in a while to see all the work I’ve done. In my journal, I use a few different types of fabric (they all absorb the dye slightly differently) and what I did to achieve the color.

If you’d like to start foraging for your own dye materials, now you can get started! And if all this seems intimidating, start by just getting to know the plants around you. The more you walk around and observe, the more you will absorb and become curious.

Happy dyeing!