If you read our earlier guide on whether banana fiber can be dyed, you already know the basics: indigo bonds directly to cellulose fibers and holds up well, while turmeric is a textbook fugitive dye that fades regardless of mordant use. We won't re-cover that ground here. Instead, this post goes deeper into three other plant-based dyes that come up often in natural-dyeing circles — madder, onion skins, and pomegranate rind — and what's actually documented about how each one behaves on a bast fibre like banana fiber.

Banana fiber is a cellulose (bast) fiber, in the same family as cotton, linen, and jute — see our full rundown of types of natural fibers for how these compare to protein fibers like wool and silk. Cellulose fibers generally take up plant dyes less readily than protein fibers, and most natural dyes need a mordant — a metal salt that helps bind dye to fiber — to hold at all. That context matters for all three dyes below, since the plant-dyeing literature on them is overwhelmingly written for wool, silk, or cotton, not banana fiber specifically.

Madder (Rubia tinctorum) is one of the oldest documented dye plants in the world — a madder-dyed cotton fragment was recovered from Mohenjo-daro, dating to the third millennium BCE, and madder-dyed textiles have been found in graves and historical records across Europe and South Asia since. The dye comes from the plant's roots, typically harvested after two years of growth: the outer layer gives a common grade of red, the inner layer a more refined one. Madder is fixed to fiber with a mordant, most commonly alum, which produces rose-red to Turkey-red shades; combining it with an iron mordant shifts the result toward purple.

Red onion skins are a common entry point for home dyers, and for good reason: they're free, don't require foraging, and give a visible result with minimal equipment. On protein fibers like wool, onion skins produce a clear maroon-brown; on cellulose fibers, the published guidance we found describes the result as lighter. Dyeing instructions typically call for mordanting cellulose fiber with tannin followed by alum, or with alum acetate, before simmering the onion skins for about an hour and dyeing in the strained liquid. The resulting color is generally described as having medium fastness — better than a fugitive dye like turmeric, but not as durable as a fiber-reactive synthetic dye.

Pomegranate peel does show up in the natural-dyeing literature — it's documented as a material used to stain wool and silk in the carpet industry. That's as far as the verifiable, general-reference source we checked goes: it doesn't name the resulting color, state whether a mordant is required, or say anything about fastness, and we found nothing describing its use on a cellulose bast fiber like banana fiber specifically.

None of the three dyes above are something The Natural Fiber Company currently offers as a finished, tested colorway — our own dyeing guide already discloses that we haven't published whether our Table Runner's Natural, Green, and Black colors use a natural or synthetic method. If you're a hobbyist dyer working with our raw or combed fiber, madder and onion skins are the more realistic starting points of the three, simply because there's more documented cellulose-fiber precedent to work from.

Banana Fiber Table Runner

Banana fiber × recycled cotton, 45 × 13 in, available in Natural, Green, and Black (PKR 3,100, currently in stock). If you're sourcing fiber specifically for hair-extension dyeing, see our dedicated color and processing guide for hair extensions, or check our wholesale page for bulk fibre orders.

View the Table Runner

Written by Dr. Qasim Siddiqui, Founder & CEO, The Natural Fiber Company. Sources: Wikipedia, "Rubia tinctorum" (madder); Maiwa, onion skin dyeing guide; Wikipedia, "Pomegranate".