And here’s how the natural dyeing experiments came out! From top to bottom we have logwood, cochineal, madder, and osage.

These are 100% cotton napkins. First I soaked them with galnut powder for tannin, then with alum for a mordant. While that was happening, I turned the various powdery bits (cochineal in that front bowl, osage on the back left, logwood on the back right, madder not pictured) into dyes. Then the fabric went in the dyes.

This was…not a quick process. It took intermittent attention over the course of a long weekend. That’s in part because I have a limited number of pots I’m willing to do dye stuff in, so I had to do things in series rather than in parallel. But it was an amusing distraction on a weekend when I needed exactly that, and I ended up with eight napkins and a whole stack of tshirts (I kept throwing tshirts in until pretty much all the color was used up).

I don’t know for sure how the color will hold up over time. I did all the things I know to help the color stay, but only time will tell. For the first few times I wash them, I’ll do it with synthrapol, which helps keep any dye that comes off suspended in the water so it doesn’t settle on anything else.

(Those are amazon affiliate link to the napkins and detergent I use, because if I’m going to send the unquestionably evil amazon traffic, I’m damn well going to let them give me a couple of cents back, but you can totally just search for them instead if you’re not comfortable with that!)