We’re frequently asked how the people get the colors into their baskets, pottery and Kachina dolls.

 The process is complex, and the results are beautiful.  Here are the traditional recipes for color: 

  Basket Colors

•        White – Natural creamy color of yucca

•        Green – Strips from the outer leaves of yucca

•        Red – A dye made from two small plants (Thelesperm gracile and thelesperm subnudum) that are boiled with a pinch of native alum and then smoked in a closed receptacle over a fire of white wool.

•        Black – Boiled in sunflower seeds and smoked with black wool.

•        Yellow – Made by drying yucca strips in the sun

•        Dark Blue – from black beans

•        Purple – from the black-seed sunflower

•        Purple and Carmine – from kinds of corn

•        Pink – from cultivated coxcomb

•        Yellow and Greenish Yellow – from flowers of the rabbit brush

•       Green – from a mixture of indigo dye with rabbit brush flower.

•      White for Yucca baskets – bleached stems of rabbit brush rubbed with white clay.

Pottery Colors

•       Black – obtained by boiling tansy mustered and adding hematite

•       Yellow – from clay rich in iron hydroxide that turns red or     orange on firing

•       White – from an iron free white clay

      Kachina Colors

•     Green and blue – from malachite

•     Black – soot and corn smut

•     Red – hematite

•     Yellow - limonite

From: The Hopi Indians by Harry C. James - 1956