Botanical Colors

10/01/2026

09/30/2026

Meet , who will be teaching a workshop at this year's retreat.

In Sanskrit, the root of the Indonesian language, cinta means love and bumi means Earth. Cinta Bumi is a space to nourish one's relationship with the Earth and one's inner artist, a place of co-creation with plants, fibers, and colors. It is a learning vessel explored through their handcrafted work, natural dye classes, and creative retreats.

Since beginning in 2013, Cinta Bumi has gone through a gradual metamorphosis, from a small business focused on products to a heart-centered practice that brings together heritage, artisanal craft, skill-sharing, and learning experiences.

They have created artisanal textile and fiber works for individuals and organizations, run more than 80 in-depth dye courses and introductory workshops, and taught 800+ students, ages 3 to 72, from over 30 countries. Beyond the numbers, what they are most grateful for is the life they share by co-creating with the plant world and with the artisans of their home archipelago, Indonesia.

We are so glad to have them with us.

09/28/2026

Foraging in the Fall - for Mordant Monday

This time of year, I am a greedy squirrel. I am constantly looking for acorns, walnuts, chestnuts, hazelnut hulls, little cones, and anything that I think might contain a tannin. Everything I find is windfall: lying on the ground and in abundance. I look for tannins that are almost completely unnoticed by the public, except possibly by other natural dyers. I wonder who else in my neighborhood is circling the same walnut tree, looking up and counting the number of bright green nuts left to fall. I come home with my pockets full of acorn caps, a beautiful leaf and mental notes of where the pokeberry bush is in our neighborhood.

Read about our foraging adventures and ’s Golden Rules of Foraging, then get yourself outdoors!

09/27/2026

Sunday Visit: The Color of Everything with Alteronce Gumby .

For Sunday Visit, Botanical Colors sits down with Alteronce Gumby, the Bronx-based abstract painter and filmmaker whose work treats color as a doorway into cosmology, deep time, and the origins of the universe. A self-described “artist-explorer,” Alteronce builds what he calls “tonal paintings” from resin, tempered glass, and gemstones, materials that refract and scatter light across the surface so each work shifts as the viewer moves. His pigments carry the history of the earth itself: the red ochre and jasper of the earliest cave paintings, matter mined and transformed across millennia.

A graduate of Yale’s MFA program and a familiar face at two of our retreats, he recently completed his award-winning documentary feature, COLOR, and is now in production on its follow-up, COLOR in Nature. Grab a cup of tea and settle in with an artist who sees color differently than almost anyone we know.

09/26/2026

Navajo Tea (Thelesperma megapotamicum) also called cota or Hopi Tea is a traditional herbal medicine and dyestuff used by the Diné. The dried stems, fine leaves and blossoms yield a warm peach to rich orange-rust shade on wool and cotton. An iron mordant shifts the color to a warm brown.

The plant is used as a tea for ailments and is considered a blood purifier. Our Navajo Tea has been stored in a non-food manner, so please do not use for medicine or for drinking.

For our samples, we used 1:1 Navajo Tea to wool gauze weight of fabric (meaning for every gram of fabric, we weighed out a gram of tea stems), added the tea to water, then heated the tea and water for about 45 minutes. NOTE: You can cut the Navajo Tea into shorter pieces. After 45 minutes, we strained the dyestuff out of the dye bath, kept the liquid and added wool gauze to the liquid, which was our dye bath. We dyed for about 1 hour, then let the fabric steep in the dye bath overnight. Please note that we usually recommend longer times for obtaining darker shades, but we saw how strong this dyestuff was and shortened our dye times. The leftover Navajo tea stems have plenty of color in them and can be extracted with more water again.

Protein fibers such as wool achieve a lovely rich orange with an alum mordant, and a brown with an iron mordant. Plant fibers such as cotton will be a lighter shade and may benefit from longer dye times. Leftover dye baths may be used to dye additional mordanted fibers, or made into lake pigments, dried and stored for other art projects.

The wool was mordanted at 15% aluminum potassium sulfate, and the darker wool sample was mordanted with iron only, at 2%. Check our instructions for iron mordant and for mordanting with aluminum potassium sulfate.

Sold in 50 gram packages. This dye will contain thin stems and small dried flowers.

09/25/2026

Coarse Walnut Hull is the same black walnut as our ground walnut hull powder, but not as finely pulverized. Use it in the same manner as regular walnut hulls to achieve rich dark brown and black tones.

Walnut Hull Powder from black walnut (Juglans nigra) is a common source of brown dye throughout North America. The fleshy hulls are full of tannin, juglone and other pigments and are the primary source of the dye. Walnut hulls were used to dye hair, make inks and clothing and are also used in herbal medicine.

For our samples, we used 1:1 walnut hull to wool gauze weight of fabric (meaning for every gram of fabric, we weighed out a gram of hulls), added the hulls to water, then heated the walnut and water for about 45 minutes. After that, we strained the walnuts out of the dye bath, kept the liquid and added wool gauze to the liquid, which was our dye bath. We dyed for about 1 hour, then let the fabric steep in the dye bath overnight. Please note that we usually recommend longer times for obtaining darker shades, but we saw how strong this dyestuff was and shortened our dye times. The leftover walnut hulls have plenty of color in them and can be extracted with more water again.

Protein fibers such as wool achieve a very dark brown. Plant fibers such as cotton will be a lighter shade and may benefit from longer dye times.

The wool was mordanted at 15% aluminum potassium sulfate, and the darker wool sample was mordanted with iron only, at 2%. Check our instructions for iron mordant and for mordanting with aluminum potassium sulfate.

Sold in 250g packages. Part of our windfall collection.

09/24/2026

Our Windfall Collection is here!

Kathy has created a new class of raw dye stuffs. Windfall is a new category of raw dyestuffs: foraged materials and surplus from the Botanical Colors studio, offered in limited quantities. The first release includes coarse walnut hulls, dried indigo leaf, Navajo tea, turmeric powder, star anise, braziletto and Osage orange. Walnut hulls are rich in tannin and give deep browns without a mordant. Osage and Navajo tea give golds and oranges. Braziletto gives reds and pinks that shift toward purple with modifiers. Turmeric gives bright yellow, and star anise gives warm tans. Each is sold raw, for dyers who want to work from the plant itself.

09/22/2026

Happy Equinox - Fall Begins and we're dreaming of Indonesia with .

09/19/2026

Handwoven H**p-Cotton Yardage

This handwoven-h**p-cotton-yardage fabric is handwoven in rural Romanian villages from locally grown, processed and spun h**p. The fabric is vintage and no longer being produced. The towels are a sturdy plain weave in a h**p cotton blend. These towels are wonderful for the bath or kitchen and grow softer with use. They are also great for dyeing, printing or painting with natural dyes.

Sold in one yard increments. If you’d like more than one yard, simply increase the number of yards and we will send you one length of fabric. The fabric is 14-16 inches wide.

H**p possesses great strength, softness and durability while its weight and drape are similar to linen and the fabric softens with age and use. Of course, it dyes beautifully. Our handwoven h**p-cotton yardage is handwoven in rural Romanian villages from locally grown, processed and spun h**p. This fabric is vintage, woven between 50 and 80 years ago and may show the its age. Although this is an unused, first quality fabric, the fabric may contain storage and dye or soil marks, weaving irregularities, minor abrasion or holes and other indicators of a handwoven rurally made textile.