Over the weekend I began looking into more dyes that could work and I read that red cabbage is very successful. What was interesting about dyeing with cabbage was that if you add vinegar to the boiling mixture it produces a purple dye and iff you add baking soda, the dye turns blue. I was excited to try this and I was wanting to experiment with creating a blue dye thats actually blue as often when people talk about things that are blue in nature (eg. berries or flowers…), they are really just purple.
I was really excited when I tried the baking soda one as the colour of the liquid turned a really rich, sort of azure blue a soon as I added the baking soda which I did not expect. Another unexpected thing happened when I was experimenting with the cabbage dyes… After an hour of boiling, the mixture with the baking soda had turned a vibrant green; I hadn’t read anywhere that red cabbage could produce a green colour but that’s a bonus as I needed to create a green colour. Unfortunately, I had lost my blue dye so I improvised by just taking out some of the liquid from the purple dye and just adding some baking soda to that; I though that maybe boiling up the baking soda mixture made it turn green so I decided not to boil this one. In the end I ended up with three colours all from one vegetable, which is something that I think really works with my concept as I have managed to use up the whole cabbage and get multiple uses from it and the purple and blue colours were quite strong.
an.andycaptures 