How to dye with onion skins

The onion skin is a useful material which is got lots of coloring easily. People who know I do natural dyeing around me give the materials from time to time. The onion is easy for getting color but only skin is used for dyeing so collecting of large amount of skin is quite uneasy. If you are interested in natural dyeing, spread about your interest to others. You may get much onion skin like me.

Let's start looking the onion skin dyeing. This is the basic way of natural dyeing using vegetable. I've used the Silk Dupioni Organza but the usual silk also can get the similar color, too. Though the cotton's color is lighter than silk's as I always say that the silk likes vegetables.

1. Boil water with dried onion skin. Keep boiling it for 20 mins more after it comes to a boil.  
I used 2L of water and 50g of onion skin.

2. Prepare the dyeing solution sift the filter net out.

3. Do the second decoction through step1 and 2 once again. It means that pour water to the onion skin what was extracted once and boil it for second decoction. This time the water needs the half amount of the beginning(1L). The onion skin can be third decoction caused by a plentiful color.

4. Combine the first, second and third dyeing solution together. Cool the added solution approximately down as 60 degrees and dye the fabric for 30 mins. 

5. Use Alum as a fixative. 

Soak the fabric in 60 degrees' water contained alum (5% of the fabric weight) for 30 mins. 

This step is for mordant dye.  

6. Rinse in water and dry it in shade.

The result of dyeing is satisfied though the onion skin was small quantity. The gardenia dyeing makes yellow color and the onion skin makes orange color like nearly gold.

I have tried shibori(a pole-wrapping technique)  pattern dye.