“Hey! Look! Oooh, yay!” I made Tod stop the car so that I could collect armfuls of freshly mown coreopsis from the ditch where they lay. Easy pickings on our way back from running errands.
Coreopsis are on the invasive species list in Japan. It is illegal to plant them. They grow heartily along the roads here, so even if I can’t have them in my garden, I can still access them for color making.
These are coreopsis lanceolata not “dyer’s coreopsis” but regardless, they yield lovely yellows, golds and oranges.
From my pile, I tried several different methods.
I separated the petals for an alcohol extraction. I ended up using that three ways: first a simple alcohol ink that is glorious bright yellow in the bottle and a vivid orange on paper. After the alcohol ink, I added water to the remaining petals in the jar and made a lake pigment for long-term storage. When I went to wash the jar, there was still a lot of color, so I slipped some cotton handkerchiefs along with some alum with the hope that they’d dye.
I simmered the stems, leaves, buds, and flowers to extract a deep brown tea that colors paper golden-orange. I bottled some as ink, then made another batch to lake into pigment.
Mysteriously in one batch, when I added alum and soda ash to a warm color tea, I got a bright red-orange. I tried to replicate it and failed. I don’t know why that batch shifted color and the others didn’t. I bottled that one into ink without any further processing, adding a touch of gum arabic for viscosity and some tea tree oil for mold inhibition.
The colors as applied to paper and cloth are beautiful. I enjoying finding all the different shades that a single plant can make. I’ll be on the lookout for more piles of mown coreopsis in the coming months.
