How to Dye Fabric With Tea

Dyeing fabric with tea is a natural dye option and is a great way to subtly change the color of fabric. As much as I love the floral fabric of this dress I made, I didn’t love the bright white background, so I started to brainstorm how to dye the fabric a slightly off-white color.

I considered dyeing with synthetic fabric dye, like RIT dye, but I didn’t want to risk changing the colors of the floral pattern, so after a little research and some tests on scrap fabric, I decided that dyeing with tea would give me the subtle color change I wanted. It worked and the process was much easier than I expected!

Since I ended up with such a large tea bath I decided to throw in a green dress that was a bit too neon for me, and I was really happy with the results! In this article I will share step by step how I dyed a dress naturally with tea plus notes on how I dyed two other dresses.

I’ve dyed paper with tea before, so I knew the general idea of how to dye with tea, but I had never tried it on fabric before. To help me get started, most of my information came from this article from Woodlark Blog, but I did a few things slightly differently based on the ingredients and supplies I had on hand. I learned a lot through trying the process myself and have a better idea of what to do next time!

Dress Details

For those wondering, the white floral dress is the Eleonora Dress by Silversaga Patterns in a cotton dimity lawn from Lyrical Fabrics. I have an article where I review all of the Silversaga Patterns I’ve made if you want to check it out!

The green dress is the Dae Dress by Soften Studio in Cloud linen (color Honeydew) from Matchy Matchy Sewing Club.

The patchwork dress is the Liliana Dress by Milaonni Patterns in a cotton block print designed by Fableism. You can read about the process of making it in my How To Make A Patchwork Dress post.

Here’s a Table of Contents if you want to skip around to certain steps:

Some Things You’ll need

• Tea bags – 50 or more depending on the size of your project. I used 113 tea bags total!
• Large pot – I used a stainless steel pot that holds 4 quarts of water.
• 2 large buckets (5 gal), sink or container – I used my deep stainless steel sink and a long plastic storage bin.
• Rubber gloves – I found gloves helpful when swirling the garments around to protect my hands from the hot tea.
• Salt – Use for plant-based fibers (cotton, linen, ramie) as a fixative
• Distilled white vinegar – Use for protein fibers (wool, alpaca, silk) as a fixative
• Optional: I used an empty (and clean) gallon milk jug to help measure water.

The storage bin I used to dye the dresses in measured about 36″ (91.5 cm) wide x 17″ (43 cm) deep and 8″ (20 cm) high (see below). I wanted the dress to have room to spread out to help it dye more evenly. This tub worked great and the tea didn’t stain it at all! You can also see I laid it on top of an old towel in case of spilling / dripping.

Using Salt Or Vinegar In Pre-Soak?

When I first wrote this article, I didn’t do a ton of research on the role that vinegar and salt play when dyeing with tea. I am also not an expert on natural dyeing but have learned about dyeing with tea through experimentation and having pretty successful results.

I’ve since learned that vinegar and salt do not act as true mordants. Mordants are used in natural dyeing to help the dye bond to the fabric. Before using a mordant though, cellulose fabrics (or plant-based fabrics, like cotton or linen) need a tannin bath which helps the fibers accept a mordant. This is a very simple explanation, and again, I am not an expert, but there are others out there who have way more experience with natural dyes. If you would like to learn more, I would check out the Farm & Folk natural dye series on their website.

I’ve also learned that tea has natural tannins, which help to prepare fabric to accept dyes, and black tea has the highest concentration of tannins compared to other teas. Since the color of the tea is my final dye color, I’m not really sure what that means, but it does bond really well with cellulose fibers, like cotton, which I’ve mainly used as my fiber of choice when dyeing with tea. For a more in-depth explanation about tannins, you can read this article by Talu Earth.

All that to say, salt and vinegar act more as a mild fixative and can help get an even dye color. The pre-soaking process, helps the fibers in the fabric to relax and open up which can help the dye adhere better to the fibers. Vinegar lowers the PH of a dyebath which helps protein fibers (wool, alpaca, silk) bond to a dye. Salt should be used when dyeing with cellulose, or plant-based fibers, like cotton, linen or ramie.

Type Of Tea To Use

Different types of tea will get you different color results so I recommend doing a test run before dyeing your final fabric or garment. I used black tea for my dye and 100 bags were a basic black tea and 13 were chai tea bags that I wanted to use up. In my tests on scrap fabric, the chai tea had more brown and yellow tones while the basic black tea had more red undertones.

In the photo below, left to right: Original undyed fabric; First test in black tea and soaked for 20-30 minutes; Second test in black tea and soaked for 10 minutes; Third test in chai tea and soaked for 10 minutes.

After my tests, my plan was to soak the white floral dress for only 15 mins for just a subtle change and to soak the green dress a little longer to see how dark I could get it (this one was more experimental).

Type Of Fabric To Use

For the tea dye to work best, use natural fibers like cotton, linen, silk and wool. The white floral dress I dyed is 100% cotton and the green dress is 100% linen. Keep in mind that white or light fabrics will hold the tea color best while dyeing a color, like the bright green fabric I was using, will only tone down the color and not change it entirely.

In the photo below, I threw the scrap piece of fabric directly into the concentrated tea in the pot for only about 10 minutes but the final dress color ended up lighter than my test swatch.

The white floral dress was about 3 yards (2.7 meters) of fabric sewn together and the green dress 2.5 yards (2.3 meters) – so that gives you an idea of how much fabric I was able to dye with the dye bath I made.

Prepping The Fabric

Make sure you pre-wash your fabric or garment beforehand to get it clean and ready to dye. This will also help prevent any shrinking that can happen in the hot tea water.

Since the floral Eleonora Dress had a lot of gathers, I removed all the elastic and drawstrings and ironed the dress to prevent the dyed from settling into any deep wrinkles.

Here’s a quick video overview of the process when dyeing my patchwork dress:

Let’s get started! The whole process was easy really, but it does help to read through the steps, and get the supplies ready beforehand to help everything go smoother.

Step 1: Prepare Tea Bags And Tea Dye

Start by opening the tea bags and removing the tags (I kept the strings on). I had a little helper so this didn’t take too long 🙂

Fill a large pot with water and bring to a boil. I used the biggest pot I had which held 4 quarts of water (16 cups or 3.8 liters) and it was a little tight for 113 tea bags. It all worked out, I just had to pay attention so the water wouldn’t boil over.

Add tea bags to the water, keep at a slow simmer and steep for 15 minutes stirring occasionally.

Step 2: Pre-Soak Fabric

Meanwhile, while the tea was steeping, I filled up a sink with warm or hot water to fully submerge the dress. I used a gallon milk jug to measure and filled the sink with 4 gallons (15 liters) of hot water and 1 cup of salt. I left the dress to soak until the tea dye was ready.

Note: If you’re dyeing a protein based fabric, like wool or silk, then adding vinegar into the pre-soak is recommended. When I first wrote this article, I was misinformed and added vinegar to the water when dyeing this cotton dress. After some research, I’ve learned that using salt is better for plant-based fibers, like cotton and linen. In the Woodlark Blog article I was following, they recommend a ratio of 1 part vinegar to 4 parts water.

Step 3: Strain Tea Bags

After the tea has finished steeping, remove the tea bags from the water. I used a strainer to lift them out of the pot and tried to squeeze out as much water as I could since the tea bags soaked up a lot of the water. I used a large spoon to do this since the water was pretty hot. Don’t worry if any of the bags break, you’ll be straining the tea again.

Once the tea bags were removed, I strained the tea through a scrap piece of fabric into a large bowl (tip: use a stainless steel bowl if you don’t want the tea to stain the bowl you’re using). You want to use a loosely woven fabric so it strains easily through – cheesecloth would be a good option here. If you’re using a 5 gallon bucket, you can just strain the tea through the fabric directly into the bucket.

None of the tea bags I used broke, but there was still quite a bit of tea “dredge” to filter out of the water.

Note: If your project is small enough, you could pour the strained tea back into the pot on the stove and dye it directly in the steeped tea to get a more concentrated dye bath.

Step 4: Add Fabric To Dye Bath

After straining the tea, I poured it into the plastic tub. The tea was very hot! You will need to add more water in order to fully submerge the garment or fabric. I added 3 more pots of hot water (from the sink) to the tub and then stirred the water.

I probably could have done with one more pot of water but I also didn’t want to dilute the tea too much.

Add the garment or fabric to the dye bath and fully soak right away. I pushed the dress down into the water to get rid of air bubbles and swirled the dress frequently – pretty much the whole time.

Since I was only soaking the white dress for 15 minutes, I kept the dress moving in the dyebath to make sure the dye was evenly dispersed.

Step 5: Rinse Fabric

Once the garment or fabric has soaked in the dyebath as long as you want (in my case 15 minutes) then rinse with cool water until the water runs clear. Keep in mind that the color will look darker when wet.

I squeezed out the dress and then hung on a hanger to drip dry while I dyed the green dress. I was loving the color at this point and didn’t notice any splotchy places!

For the green dress, I put it in the same dye bath as soon as the floral one was out and repeated the same steps. Except, I soaked it for about an hour and didn’t swirl it around in the dye bath as frequently – about every 15 minutes. The water was also lukewarm at this point. I noticed more splotchy spots on the green dress in the end and I wonder if heating the water up again and would have helped.

Final Wash

I washed both dresses together in a gentle wash cycle with a mild detergent and dried in the dryer. It’s up to you how you want to wash your fabric and garments and you can choose to line dry if you prefer.

Before & After

The color change of the floral white dress is pretty subtle, but that’s just what I wanted! There are only a couple of spots where the dye was a little splotchy but it’s really not noticeable and was pretty hard to capture through photos anyway.

There was a more obvious color change after dyeing the green dress and I really love the muted light yellowish green color it turned out!

However there were some more obvious spots where the dye wasn’t even (photo below) and I suspect it could have been prevented with hotter water, more swirling, or maybe more vinegar or salt in my pre-soak. It’s really not that noticeable though with all the gathers of the dress!

Tea Dyeing Experience #2

After finishing my blockprint patchwork dress, I felt like the white background was a little too bright for me. Enter: Tea dyeing experience number two! 🙂 I followed basically the same process as the first time and it turned out exactly how I hoped!

Like before, I started with dyeing a few fabric swatches to see if I would like the tea color background. I loved results and it was just what I was wanting – a subtle change in the background color to tone down the whiteness. I wasn’t going for a dark tea color, but wanted to make the background an off-white.

I removed the drawstring from the neckline and ironed the neckline to prevent the dye from settling into the gathers.

I then soaked the dress in a sink with 4 gallons of hot water and 1 cup of salt.

While the dress was soaking, I started on the tea dye. I had a little less than 100 of the Lipton tea bags, maybe 95, and I had some of these Benner Tea Co tea bags that were larger (1 tea bag per 1 quart of water). I added 6 of these larger tea bags in with the smaller ones.

I put all of the tea bags into a large pot (4 quarts) of boiling water and steeped the tea bags at a simmer for around 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

I used the same long plastic container as before, strained and added the tea, and then 3 more pots of hot water (from the sink). I added the dress into the dye bath and soaked for 15 minutes, stirring around the water for mostly the whole time.

I rinsed the dress out with cool water until the water ran clear and washed with a mild detergent (just a small amount) and dried the dress on low heat (you could also line dry).

Before & After

The difference is pretty subtle, but that’s just what I wanted! I didn’t want to change the colors in the block print patterns too much, I just wanted to tone down the background.

The color difference is more obvious when the original fabric is next to the tea dyed fabric. Overall, the tea warmed up the whole dress, which I really love. 🙂

I hope it was helpful to read through my tea dyeing experiences! I would love to hear if you’ve tried dyeing with tea or if you have any questions about the process. Thanks for reading!