Playing with natural dyes
How lucky I am to have a lovely bunch of guild friends who are as excited as I am about making colour on fluff, yarn and fabric. Yesterday 7 of our guild members got together in a small house in Harlow and boiled up vegetable matter to create a range of colours on a variety of textiles. We had a lovely shared lunch and when the end of the day came we all went home tired but excited and with a range of bits and pieces that we'd dyed during the day.
We started off in the morning by mordanting a selection of mini skeins of yarn - and a few larger skeins. Our expert chemist prepared baths of Alum, Chrome, Copper and Tin. Meanwhile I prepared several dye baths - we had annatto, avocado pits and avocado skins. We also had a previously prepared woad solution.
By the time we sat down for our shared lunch we were ready to go for the afternoon of colour creation. The woad bath gave us some soft turquoisey blues, we got wonderful yellows and oranges from the annatto, and the avocado gave us a range of pinks and soft reds. Later we used a pre-prepared elderberry dye bath (which was a bit rank in the aroma department) from which we got some very deep berry colours - I wonder how colour fast those will be...... We also had an oak gall dye bath from which we got yellowish tans and a very dark brown, and a very week logwood bath from which we got blues/lilacs and greys. We also revitalised an old (several years old) indigo dye bath with some Spectralite and got some good blues from that.