Continuing on with the plan to keep busy over Spring Break the kid and I attended a weekend Girl Guide camp with 6 girls from her (my) Unit and 15 from a Unit in another town. We had a great time and the theme for this camp was Heritage. The girls spent the weekend doing traditional activities from the Canadian Pioneer era.
We started the weekend using natural food dyes to dye scarves for each of the girls. We had 4 patrols so had four different foods to use to dye the scarves: beets, blueberry, turmeric, and spinach. All of the dyes except for the spinach had been prepared ahead of time - blueberry and turmeric were boiled in water and then strained to just leave the dye. The beet juice was left over from pickled beets, but the spinach we made that day from some frozen spinach: boiled and then strained. In hindsight we really should have prepped the spinach ahead of time and probably used fresh.
The girls all put their plain, white, thin cotton, scarves in a mason jar to soak over night. It became pretty clear quite quickly that the spinach was not giving the dramatic colour change that the others were in the jar. We did try a few things that night to bump up the colour including adding some turmeric (which did add blotches of colour) and adding in some of the blueberry juice as well in the hopes that yellow+blue would =green but nothing really worked.
The next day we rinsed the scarves and hung them to dry. Beet, blueberry and turmeric did a good job dyeing the fabric. Spinach...not so much. But that is the nature of experimentation.
Hanging the scarves to dry added some great colour to the scenery!
All the girls were really good about accepting the spinach failure, which was great, but since the kid was part of the spinach group we came home with a basically white scarf so I set to google to search out some other dye options.
Did you know that avocado skins and pit can be used to dye fabric pink? Me neither! Conveniently I had an avocado and was able to try it out.
After getting as much of the avocado off the skins as I could and cutting the pit into smaller bits I added them to a saucepan with about two cups of water and brought to a boil. Once it was boiling I turned the temperature down and let it simmer for about half an hour before adding the scarf. I removed the skins but left the pit pieces in (not sure if that made a difference or not) and let the scarf soak over night.
Avocado Food Dye Set Up
In the morning we had a pale orange-pink scarf. It's really weird to me that something that is so green as a fruit will turn fabric pink! I wonder what other colour transforming fruits and vegetables there are out there?
Family Dog Modelling the Scarf
We'll be sewing the scarf to the backside of The Kid's camp blanket after using fabric markers to write "Heritage Camp 2016" on it - I'm not sure how long the colouring will stay but she'll enjoy it while it does.
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