Avocado dye

Are you looking for some zero waste entertainment for the kids? Or for yourself?

Try dyeing with vegetable scraps. You can give old clothes new life and experiment with awesome colours. This beautiful pink is made from avocado skins and seeds!

Just scrub the avocado flesh off the skins and stones and put them in water. I brought them to the boil and then, when the water had cooled down a bit, I added an old t-shirt (which had some marks on it that wouldn’t come out). I left it on a really low heat for a couple of hours then turned off the heat and left it overnight.

The colour on this shirt is not entirely even because of the wrinkles in the fabric but I think that makes it more interesting. If you want a more even colour, try moving it around more often while it sits in the dye. Because it is a natural dye, the pink colour also fades a little with each wash but I also think that’s fun and interesting. When the colour has faded a lot, you can re-dye it with something else!

Lots of natural materials make really interesting (and sometimes surprising) colours…

• Onion skins (brown or red onions work)

• Carrots

• Red cabbage

• Turmeric

• Cherries

• Blueberries

• Bark

• Different wild flowers

For best results, dye natural fabrics like cotton.