Natural Blue Dye Plants

Which plants or flowers can be used to make natural blue dyes for fabrics or yarn?

So far, we have discussed plant materials that can be used to extract yellow and red dyes for fabric, yarn, paper, etc. Yellow natural dye sources are pretty abundant!

There are lots of different wildflowers, native plants, trees and mushrooms that will give you some shade of yellow, from lemon shades to butter to deep ochre colors.

Natural sources of red dyes are not quite as easy to find. Surprisingly, there are not that many plants or flowers that can give you a strong red color.

And, blue is even harder to produce! So, you will see that this list is quite a bit shorter than the yellow and red sources.

The most well known source for a true blue dye is Indigo which has been used for centuries to create a deep, strong blue to purple shade.

There are several different varieties of Indigo which can be used to make blue dye, including the Indigofera plants and Japanese Indigo (Persicaria Tinctoria)

Note: Baptisia aka False Indigo does not produce blue.

As with all natural dyeing, the final color you end up with depends on a number of different factors including:

• Stage of life of the plant
• Time of year
• Preceding weather conditions
• pH of the water used
• Mordant used, if any
• Modifiers used, if any
• Material of the dyepot

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I wish I had more blue plant dyes to share with you but unfortunately there just aren’t any.

The good news is that the best plants (Indigo, Woad and Logwood) give you a strong, deep blue that can also be mixed with other natural dye colors to produce different shades!

Looks like I will have some experimenting to do!
I hope this is helpful for you. If you know of some blue dye material that I need to add to this list, please let me know.
Annette

Natural Blue Dye Plants