I recently went down to the Taos Mesa area, north and west of Taos, along the Rio Grande river basin. This is one of my favorite "areas of outstanding natural beauty" to use a Britishism for the Land of Enchantment. Big sagebrush, Rubber Rabbitbrush, Fringed Sage, Cholla and Paddle cactus surround you in these parts, with Juniper, Cottonwoods, and Pinon trees as the taller native flora. I've been wanting to do dye test to see firsthand the beautiful colors these plants contain so I took sparingly and mindfully from abundant growing areas and dyed equal weight of fiber for all three tests. This means I made a bath of 100g of plants to dye 100g of cotton.
The yellow hues are very similar because they are all from the Asteraceae botanical family and contain the same pigment components from the chemical group Favonoids. Both sages are in the Artemesia genus, and not related to culinary sage or claifornia sage which are Salvias. These desert sages (big sagebrush and Fringed sagebrush) both contain Luteolin and Aigenin colorants, while the Rabbitbrush mainly Quercetin along with Rutin, Luteolin colorants.
Rabbitbrush especially has been used by local people for hundreds of years for its vibrant yellow dye.
For the samples, the bigger bandana cloths are silk, the smaller smaples are cotton and linen, and the darker pieces dyed with sagebrush were added to a 2nd bath containing a pinch of iron to oxidize the tannins present in the dye, giving it a warm olive green tone.
I am drying out the exhaust bath from the iron + sagebrush to make a shelf stable lake pigment powder from, more on that once the process is complete.
