Dye Project: Beet Stems

I recently tried solar dyeing using beet stems (Beta vulgaris) from one of our son's borscht cooking projects. The stems are red, but not as intensely red as the beet roots. I was curious whether the stems would provide the same color. I also wonder whether the dye will be colorfast, or will it fade rapidly with time like the red cabbage. Surprisingly, I have never dyed with beets before!

Solar dyeing with beet stems - day 1

I forgot to weigh the stems before creating the dye bath, but I guestimate they weighed about the same as the fabric - 77 grams. I rinsed the stems with water and gave them a very rough chop.

Beet stems ready to chop

For this project, I used one cotton dish towel that had been prepared as described in Preparing your Fabric (Scour, Mordant, Brighten or Sadden). The towels had been scoured, mordanted with oak gallnut extract, and brightened with alum and soda ash. The weight of fabric (WOF) was 77 grams, or 2.7 ounces. The WOF% was 100% for the approximately 77 grams of fruit. Dyers typically recommend equal weights of fabric and plant material for solar dyeing. I added three teaspoons of alum and boiling water to the jar, and then layered beet stem chunks with dishtowel fabric, and topped off the jar with more boiling water.

Beet stems - day 14

I steeped the dishtowels in the beet stem dye bath for two weeks, making sure to rock and rotate the jar daily to distribute dye and fruit evenly. Over the course of the two weeks, the color turned from a lovely pink to a brownish pink.

Hang to dry

As with previous solar dyeing projects, I squeezed out excess dye, rinsed the fabric, and then ran it through the washing machine without detergent and hung to dry. After waiting two weeks to set the dye, I washed the fabric with a mild textile soap [like Synthropol or Professional Textile Detergent (a.k.a., Dharma Dyer's Detergent)] and hung it out to dry. The result is a pale shade of brownish-gray (with a possible tinge of pink in certain light). It will be interesting to see how colorfast the dye is over time.

Beet stems produce a shade of brownish-gray