#foragedcolor

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Tartarian Honeysuckle : A neighborhood plant on the edge of an alley, blooming mid may. The flowers were beautiful, but perhaps not the most interesting of colors to impart on cotton. 

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Dye Garden Flower : Sulphur Cosmos

These flowers are easy to grow, have a long bloom time, and give vibrant oranges, a color I haven’t found too common. I have included these in recent shirt and bandana bundle dyes. You can leave them whole for flower shaped imprints or break them up for a confetti of color.

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Yellow Sweetclover, another weed in the neighborhood. This plant can grow quite tall, with long skinny stalks containing hundreds of tiny yellow flowers. My plant app identified it as sweetclover. If you had enough of the plant, you could make a lovely yellow dye bath.

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Crossweed, this plant is named, although I dont have a picture of the actual plant outdoors. Its a common small weed that grows here in the city in Denver, and blooms a little later than common storksbill, and is similar in that it also has small purple flowers. Another purple giving off green scenario. 

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Alfalfa grows commonly in myneighborhood and I noticed it blooming late june this year. I picked a couple flower heads and tested its color. I think the purple flowers imparted the greener colors on the test cotton. 

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Honeysuckle: There are giant honeysuckle bushes on the edge of an alley in my neighborhood and I gathered the flowers from the sidewalk once they started dropping from their branches last summer. Im delighted to see that there is beautiful color from these dried flowers and look forward to collecting more this year.

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Amaranth is an ancient grain to America. It’s also a plant that many of our city parks in denver plant in public spaces and easements. It is tall with big burgundy fluffy grassy flower and seed heads. I tested a small stem of seed pods and got a pleasant light pink but more pale than I was hoping for. I am growing amaranth myself this year for the first time, so I have all summer to do more research and see if there are better methods or practices for exracting more color.