My summer plans to make a purple basil dye were fairly waylaid. Due to a number of chaotic reasons including but not limited to being sick for 2 months, my poor purple basil didn’t get enough sun, didn’t get enough water, and was in a generally dreary state come late-August. I got it to limp along until I could try and salvage an ink batch out of it.
I start off by following a rough guide from the internet: boil 2 cups of water and pour over the leaves, then simmer for an hour. I also added some salt/vinegar. After an hour honestly a bit of pinkish colour had seeped out but it didn’t appear on a swatch. I kept it simmering for a few more hours but there wasn’t much change. I then decided to add some baking soda to change the PH and this is where the real magic started happening: it turned green!
I let it simmer for another 45 mins with the baking soda and then took it off the heat to cool with a fabric swatch in it to dye overnight.
The following day I also bottled the remaining liquid into ink with some gum arabic and cedarwood essential oil (prevents molding).
The green swatch is from the first day, the brown swatch card is how much the ink changed colour overnight from sitting: natural dyes are so fascinating in their live, reactive state! Neither colour was what I was “supposed” to get: silvery blue is more the expected colour-tone from purple basil dyes.
I let the swatch dry, with these results:
It’s honestly a beautiful desaturated green and I really love the difference between the three swatch methods and results. Together it’s a lovely and interesting gradient. Despite my unexpected result, I’m really happy with how the project turned out.
I would really like to grow purple basil again next year and try to coax perhaps more of that early purple out or aim for the silvery blue in contrast to this green.
This has probably been the most fun I’ve had with an ink: I really loved swatching the cotton alongside the paper swatches. I want to continue that for all future inks and add in different fabrics (linen, silk) as I thrift them.
Thank you so much for reading and supporting my Strandline project. This is a personal project I’ve started outside of my day-job of being a graphic designer. I want to document my love of nature, work on improving my art.
Please consider following for free if you enjoyed this to support my work! It means the world :) I hope you found something wonderful or curious while reading, as I did writing it.