Solanum melanocerasum (also known as garden huckleberries or wonderberries) is a prolific plant that takes work and patience to make it, uh, taste good, but with a little effort, it is a wonderful berry to have in the garden. It makes an interesting dye plant, though as I have mentioned, I rarely plant things just for dye, with the exception of indigo and madder.

These are not ripe berries. Look away. Do not even think of picking. When ripe, the berries are dull, soft, some starting to wrinkle and all the leaves have fallen off the plant. It takes LOADS of patience to pick these at the right time. For me, it is after first frost. I made up a rhyme for these: "Hard with shine, still needs time. Soft and dull, pick a pail full."

Thing is, you need to to a baking soda boil on these before you do anything with them. I used about 1/4 cup of baking soda and boiled them for a few minutes and then drained and rinsed. When processed like this and cooked, the berries have a blueberry flavor.
With them, we made the most beautiful mead ever:

And the most beautiful jam ever:

The color! Okay, onto extracting pigment. Here are lake pigments drying:

Wow, that color.
Once dried and ground finely, I added gum arabic and honey:

And then applied it to paper and wood to test the lightfastness.

I knew going in that this wouldn't be lightfast, that ph green/purple switch screams anthocyanins, which is never any good at lasting though loads of fun. I just wanted to see how bad it was. You never no, surprises do happen!
The top color was painted and then covered on the left side of the line with the right side exposed and left in a sunny window. The three colors below are all homegrown indigo, transformed into maya blue from two different growing seasons. (Oh, the tiny wood sample is another botanical pigment that I have been experimenting with that IS lightfast and was such a nice surprise. More on that later.)
The sample below is after 3 months.

You can see that the solanum didn't hold up too well, but it wasn't as quick to fade as I thought it would be either. Would I use it on my wooden work for sale? No. Should I test how this performs under different circumstances on wool fiber? Yeah, could be fun.
So this is another plant I'll continue growing for food (just like hopi amaranth) and probably mess around with on fiber for fun and for my own knitting projects, but it won't be making an appearance in my actual professional wooden work.
That indigo though. So good.