Has anyone tried this? what gave the best results? I just tried it with 6 beige cotton throwovers, but they only darkened a shade. I used about 15 tea bags steeped in 2 litres of water and I soaked the throws over night...

Or should I just give in and buy a bottle of brown dye?

candi

Never give in! Have you tried onion skins? They might work.

Did you use boiling hot water?

this is random, but my grandmother would save beets and red onion skins for dying eggs red for Easter. i'm sure it would work for cloth, but you want browm not red.

i used to tea dye cotton ribbon so that it looked antique. i would fill up the kitchen sink with hot water and add tea bags until i thought it was dark enough and then put the fabric in. i would remove the tea bags (so there wouldn't be any trails of draker color if the bags and fabric touched) and check on the fabric until i was happy with what i got. i don't know much about washability though b/c i never had to wash the ribbon.

This is a bit off-topic, but once for Haloween (this year, actually) I wanted to put orange ribbons in my hair. Having no orange ribbon, I improvised with some white satin ribbon I had. I poured a packet of orange Kool-Aid into a cup filled with hot water, steeped the ribbon in the solution for awhile, and ended up with orange (couloured AND scented) ribbon!
- Aimee

i used to dye my hair with kool-aid too...that stuff lasts forever!

Martha Stewart last easter had a whole article on a natural dyes for eggs but said you could use them on other things ie fabric, i think the info is on the website, they got a really cool range of colours from things like onionskins and tea. ros

http://www.marthastewart.com/features/features.asp?CID=830&idContentType=10

here is the story.

Rebecca Purcell, the author of Interior Alchemy, recommends coffe dying: 4 to 5 scoops of instant coffee in a couple of gallons of warm water. She suggests making the mixture too dark on purpose, and then rinsing the fabric out in cold water. She says that coffee gives a warm yellowed cast that mimics old age, while tea dying gives fabric a more pinkish hue. Good luck!

I once had to dye a costume for a play I was in with tea. Here's how I did it:

I filled the kitchen sink with hot water (boiled on the stove) and a boxfull of cheap teabags. I balled up the garment and let it soak in the sink overnight. (balling the garment and leaving the teabags in created a nice dirty, patchy, uneven stain, which was what I needed.)

The next morning, I rinsed the dress in hot water to "set" the stain. (remember how you should always wash your period undies in cold so the stain comes out? Hot water sets the stain in the fabric.) My mother also reccommended that after rinsing the dress, I soak it in warm salty water to "set" the dye more.

I have no idea why this works, but I followed her directions, and the dress didn't lose any of it's nice dirty brown stain for the entire show, even though it was washed every night.