Name: Lori
Message: I tried to dye pillow ticking with beet juice. The fabric was prewashed. After soaking the fabric I washed it with hot water and white vinegar to help set the color. I washed out completely. Then I tried soaking the fabric overnight, wrung it out, wraped it in a towl and then dried in the clothes dryer. It looked great but when I washed it the color came completely out again. What can I do to permantely set the new color. After coloring the fabric, it has to be washed because it smells and I don't want the stain rubbing off on the furniture. Thanks for your help.

It is a great mistake to attempt natural dyeing without first reading some good books on the subject. Most colored materials will simply wash out of fabric, as in your experience with beets on cotton. This is too temporary to even be considered dyeing. In order to dye with lasting results, you must match the dye to the fiber, and either follow the instructions given by natural dyeing experts, or do thousands of your own experiments, expecting most combinations that you try not to work. Most plant materials are naturally colored with chemicals that do not retain their color indefinitely; instead, their colors tend to turn brown, or just wash out altogether.

If you want to dye with beets, I recommend that you use wool, not cotton. Wool's properties as a protein fiber allow it to hold on to many dyes that will not stick to cotton at all. I also recommend that you premordant your wool with alum or another metal ion mordant. Read a good book on natural dyeing to learn how to do this. A third point is that it is woefully inadequate to simply soak your fiber in the dyebath. You must cook your fiber in the dye! Simmer your pre-mordanted wool for an hour in a dyebath prepared with several times more pounds of beets than you have of wool. After dyeing, use only cool water to wash your wool, not hot water which will tend to remove the dye. A fourth point is that beets are noted for giving rather disappointingly soft pale shades, not the bright red that you might expect. To obtain a good red with natural dyes, use a weed called goosegrass, or an insect dye such as cochineal, or buy some natural red dye, such as brazilwood, alkanet, bloodroot, or madder.

If you want to dye in cool water, do not use natural dyes. You can obtain only a stain that is not washfast, not a dye. For dyeing cotton in cool water, use fiber reactive dyes such as Procion MX, Cibacron F, or Drimarene K dye (never all-purpose dye).

I recommend that you buy a good book on natural dyeing, such as the 2003 edition of Jill Goodwin's "A Dyer's Manual". It is important to get the second (2003) edition, rather than the 1982 first edition, as the information on safety is much improved in the more recent edition. Do not try to buy this book on Amazon, as they sell only the inferior first edition, at very high prices (over $100!); the best and cheapest source I have found for this book, even for those of us who are in the US, are its own web site, at http://www.adyersmanual.co.uk/, or a bookseller such as the David Brown Book Co.