How can I make my own dye with things around the house?

Question

How can I make my own dye with things around the house?

Answer 1

koolaid packets and food dye does the job

Answer 2

It depends on what you want to do with the dye. The juice from red cabbage makes a good dye for indicating pH, but it is no good for coloring fabric or yarn.

If you want to color fabric, anything with artificial coloring, such as unsweetened Kool-aid drink mix powder or Easter egg dye, will work very well to  dye wool, and less well to dye nylon or silk, but it will not work at all on cotton. Food coloring cannot be used as a dye for cotton, but will just wash out, leaving at most an ugly stain. To dye wool with food coloring, soak it in vinegar with a drop of dish soap, then cook it in water that has had the food coloring dissolved in it, slowly bringing the temperature of the water to a boil; keep it just below a boil for half an hour or longer, then allow it too cool before rinsing.

Some people like to use Sharpie markers to color fabric. This is not really a dye, but a pigment. It will gradually wash out. Special fabric markers work better and last longer, but you probably don't have any of those around the house.

There are a few natural substances that can be used to dye cotton. If you boil fabric for half an hour with the spice turmeric, you will get a nice bright yellow color. It will fade in the light, so you will have to repeat the process every year or so, more frequently if you expose your fabric to sunlight. Turmeric is one of the very few natural dyes whose color will stick to cotton without mordanting with chemicals that you do not have around the house. Most natural dyes will wash out of cotton quickly. Even when properly mordanted by boiling with alum, cotton dyed with natural dyes will not retain the color nearly as long as cotton dyed with a good tie-dye kit.