Weld Eco pot and Trefriw Woollen Mill Textile Market 3/4th December.

Quite where time goes too I don't  know but although I am not blogging much I am dyeing.! :)


Here is the colour I got from the  weld ( Reseda Luteola) I found growing by the Conwy Estuary a few weeks ago,.  I roughly chopped the  weld and put it into a kilner jar with 50 gms of blufaced leicester  and then left it for a few days.  When  I had time Iput it into large pan with two  other ecopots  so the pots were in a waterbath andheated slowly for a few hours. The colour from the weld was not brilliant-quite pale  but I was too busy to deal with it so I left  it for a few days before popping it back in the pan for another slow heating .  This time the yellow deepened and a tad of ammonia turned it the bright yellow in the picture.   I haven't taken it out as I am demonstrating eco dyeing  at Trefriw Textile Market on Sunday 4th December and this is a good example of how you can test dyes without having to use lots of heat. The other advantage of this method is multicoloured dyeing and when  I have a moment I shall show  the results of dyeing  with several dyes. Or you could come ( if you can) to the Textile Market to the Demos on the morning if the second day!
Waterbath dyeing is decribed in my book Colours of the Wolrd Ecodyeing which  you can buy from my website.  
If you would like to know mor eabout the book Jenny Dean generously reviewed it on her blog and you can find that here

Weld and bloggers block!

I have had bloggers block.
Here are the reasons:
Boring ones:
asthma
coming off HRT so I have lots of night  sweats and insommia
Fun ones
A Kindle
I sit in bed drinking a cup of tea reading in the morning  ( telling myself I really ought to blog but.......)
Marmite.
Marmite is not  what  you think , a famous black yeast spread to put on your toast , but in fact a black and white sprocker ( cross beteen a springer and a cocker) now a mischievous and energetic 5 month old. ( yes we thought we were mad too!)
Yesterday we were out for the day having a walk together and doing our best to tire out the said Marmite (as we call his name we hear a chorus from other dog walkers every where we go of "love him or hate  him "-a reference to the famous advertising campaign for  Marmite with a tag line of "love it or hate it")  .

It was our wedding anniversary and we were going out of  a meal in the evening so dog had to be well and truly tired out so he would sleep  rather than chewing up shoes or slippers or some such while we are out-he always find s something . ) So we were walking along the Conwy estuary loking across the river  to the famous Conwy castle built by Edward 1st to keep the Welsh down and trying to persuade Walnut our springer spaniel and Marmite that a dip in the fast flowing river was not perhaps the best of ideas when to my astonishment I saw huge stands of Weld.  Of course I did not have my camera! (sigh ) but take my word for it there was masses  of it behind fences.

I picked a bit of the  seed heads where most  of the dye is and tomorrow I shall  dye with it. ( Not before sprinkling it the seeds around some  newly dug earth  where weld likes to grow.

I was surprised  to see it so near the sea so I am interested to see whether it might be a different variety to the one I have growing in the garden . I tis certainly very vigorous some of stands were at least 6 ft high.
ps Marmite has kept me company while I was writing this  and enjoyed himself ripping up an old catalogue and then enterprisingly he went down stairs, brought up the dustpan  and is chewing that.