Cosmos Orange
Made with the flowers of the Cosmos sulphureus
Our handmade watercolours are all available on our Etsy store.
Fancy growing your own bouquet of orange and yellow flowers? Consider these plants!
Native to South America, they are well-attuned to the year-round heat and humidity. Perhaps this is why these flowers can be frequently spotted in our community gardens! Not to mention the flowers are also edible; adding a splash of colour on top of bakes. They are also able to attract more bee-zy pollinators to the garden.
Sulphur cosmos also don’t only come in one shade of orange. There are also varieties with yellow, red and even white flowers with pinkish edges! Ganesh from Woodlands Botanical Garden in Singapore grows quite a few of these beautiful varieties…
It is the ones with the orange flowers that we work with. We have come across dyers online using the orange flowers as a source of natural dye. They also seem particularly popular for eco-printing.
Years back, we tried extracting the pigments from the orange dye solution after soaking the flowers in hot water. With alum as the metal mordant, the dye becomes a intense orange-red, which becomes precipitated as orange pigments with an alkaline solution. Having worked with so many bright flowers which eventually gave pale brown and gray lake pigments, we were wonderfully surprised to see the pigments maintain the bright orange hue of the flowers! Today, we still offer this watercolour paint, because it remains one of our favourites.
