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Whether red cabbage, elderberry juice or blueberry juice - There are always ways to paint. Recently, Painting by Numbers Expert has been testing painting with natural substances and vegetable materials. You don't have to go shopping for it, because much of it can already be found in the kitchen. You can achieve beautiful natural results with ingredients that everyone has at home. For our first dye experiment, we focused on yellow onions. Dyeing fabric with onion peels is very easy, and we will show you how to do it!
Dyeing fabric with onion peels
What do you need?
- Peel 7 yellow onions
- 300 g cotton or linen fabric
- 4 liters of water
- wooden spoon (an old one is fine)
- Steel cooking pot (this should only be used for painting)
For our first attempt we dyed 300g linen fabric. We used vintage fabric for this DIY hobby. Even though the fabric has been washed several times over the years, we still washed it again beforehand. Once you have a suitable fabricchosen, you can prepare the paint. To do this, boil the onion peels in about 4 liters of water in a pan. The more onion peels you use, the more intense the colour result will be.
While the dye stock is boiling, soak the fabric to be dyed in water. Before painting, wring it out well until it no longer drips.
Once the food coloring has been brought to the boil, you can lower the heat slightly so that it is just simmering. Now you can put the damp fabric in the dye bath. After an hour, remove the pot with the dye bath from the stove.
Voordat je de deksel op de pot doet en het geheel met de restwarmte enkele uren laat sudderen, moet je de uienvellen verwijderen.
We found it special that the peels of the yellow onions look a lot like the peels of a red onion after dyeing.
The colour result with this method is very soft. We left the pieces of fabric in the paint for different lengths of time. It is best to leave the fabric in the dye bath at least overnight. The first fabric was dyed for 10 hours, the second for 18 hours and the third for 24 hours.
We wish you a lot of fun with your colour experiments!
