Osage Orange is a traditional natural dye derived from the heartwood of the Osage Orange tree. The species originated in the bio-regions of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas but it has naturalized all over the eastern US and beyond. As a dye it yields relatively colorfast shades of yellow from pastels to dark gold depending on the weight of fiber ratio. When combined with iron varying shades of tans and browns are achieved depending on both the osage and iron ratios. The color recipe I have to share with you today is a saturated golden Osage yellow which can be optionally shifted to a mineral olive green with iron. As with all natural dye recipes we begin by scouring.

After a thorough scour the fabric will need to be treated with tannin and potassium aluminum sulfate mordant both at 10% WOF. The tannin and mordant processes are explained in this post. I recommend choosing a clear tannin such as oak galls, or a yellow such as myrobalan. The photos I’m sharing today are from a big dye session I did last fall where I dyed 7 yards of linen fabric that will be used as a background color for a large quilt I’m working on. I dyed one yard at a time in my 5 gallon dye pot. Osage sawdust was weighed out at 30% WOF (that’s 30% of one yard). I poured about a gallon of boiling water in the pot and soaked the sawdust overnight. The next day I topped off the dye pot with water, brought it up to about 120°f and added a yard of mordanted fabric. I brought the heat up to a low simmer and held it there for an hour stirring every so often and being careful to keep the fabric submerged. After an hour the fabric was a deep golden yellow. I let it cool in the pot for several hours then rinsed it once and shook off the sawdust bits before hanging it on the clothesline to dry.

I kept the exhaust dye bath and for the next yard I weighed out just 15% WOF (half of the original 30% ratio) because the dye bath was still strong looking. I dyed the second yard the same way as the first and kept repeating this until I worked my way through all 7 yards. This method yielded very similar depths of shades on all 7 yards. There were subtle variations but this will look beautiful on the finished quilt.

Osage yields such a beautiful warm and happy yellow. You can stick with the yellow if you please but my end goal for this was green. Osage at this golden yellow shade will shift to a greeny-yellow-brown in an iron bath. I treated 1 yard at a time in my designated iron bath pot. The ferrous sulfate was weighed out at 4% WOF. Working with an iron bath is tricky. You have to work quickly and stir stir stir without stopping to get even results. If you’re not careful enough your results will be super splotchy. You can refer to my book Farm & Folk Quilt Alchemy for my best tips regarding working with an iron bath. I refreshed the iron bath in a similar way I refreshed the dye bath that I explained above by adding just a pinch of iron to each subsequent exhaust bath to achieve a consistent shade of green on each yard of fabric. This is tricky and it took a lot of practice on previous projects over the years before I was able to become good at it.

I’ll share more when I begin working on this custom quilt soon. This color recipe can also be found in my book on page 57 (in the side note). One of the quilt patterns (An Ode to Summer on page 100) in my book features this olive green Osage background.

I recently achieved a more antique brass version of this color by tweaking the iron ratio. I’ll share those results with you soon. Let me know if you try this formula!