Dying with Pomegranates

The Pomegranate - The 'posh' fruit in the British fruit bowl perhaps, (or at least the most expensive!)   How fortunate I was to discover an abundance of them growing wildly from the trees in Lemba!! What a novelty it was to use these luxurious fruits to to explore the process of nartural dying. As I passed by the exploding pomegranate trees on my way home from the local supermarket, I picked a couple of bags worth and headed back to the studio to began my natural dying experimentation.

We seperated the seeds from the shells anticipating to get two separate colour dyes from the one fruit. The shells were a fabulous bright yellow inside and the seeds ranged from clear to a juicy rouge.

Once separate, we added water and cold pressed the two seperate mixtures by squeezing them with our hands and bashing them with stick!

To see whether it made a difference to the colour, we also tried boiling the shells:

The valley by the college was a consensed sea of Morning Glory, so we continued the experiment further and using the same method as the pomegranate we separated the purple and pink parts of the flower to see how the colour varied:

After 24 hours we sieved the mixtures and soaked our fabrics in the dyes for a further 24 hours. (The fabrics were sourced from the local charity shops).