Natural Dyeing with Coreopsis Tinctoria Flowers - Fresh from the Dye Garden!
Would you like to learn how to grow your own natural dye plants? In February 2026, I ran an online workshop ‘Planning a Natural Dye Garden’, and you can buy the recording here. It includes a PDF of plants and other resources. In the workshop I share my wealth of knowledge from seven years of growing in variety of spaces, and guide you through the best dye plants to grow for your own space. Whether you have a balcony or a large garden, there are dye plants suitable for you! Click here to learn more and purchase.
I’ve got 15 Coreopsis Tinctoria plants in the dye garden, and they just have started flowering rather prolifically! The variety is ‘Roulette’, which gives multiple shades of yellow and red blooms (seeds purchased from Chiltern Seeds).
I’ve been picking blooms daily and drying them until I have enough for a dye bath. On a particularly sunny Saturday, I picked 50g of flowers, so decided to make a fresh dye bath to test the colour potential in these flowers. A 50g harvest sounds small - but these flowers are tiny!
To prepare the flowers for the dye pot, I removed any long bits of stalk so as not to contaminate the colours, but kept the flowers whole. I added them to a pot of cold water, which I heated to a simmer for an hour, then left to cool overnight. The next day, I strained the liquid through a muslin to remove any bits of plant material - this is optional but it stops bits of plant getting stuck in the yarn!
100g of alum mordanted wool yarn was then added to the dyepot. I then reheated the pot to a simmer for an hour, and again left it to cool overnight.
I then let the skein of yarn dry on the washing line without having rinsed it first - I’ve found that this helps the yarn retain more of the colour. Once the yarn was dry I then rinsed and washed it in a pH neutral soap.
As you can see below the resulting colour is just stunning! I really didn’t expect to get this vibrant an orange from only half the weight of plant to fibre. It will be interesting to see how dyeing with dried flowers will compare…
