Growing Colour Tyfu Lliw

This is both about growing colour quite literally as plants in my garden and also about using them. I dye fibres with natural dyes and use them to "paint" with. This is how I make my landscapes , mostly of the North Wales countryside Mae Tyfu Lliw yn enw addas iawn i'r 'blog' yma. Yr wyf yn cael hwyl yn tyfu bob math o flodau i Helen i'w defnyddio. Mae hi yn creu lluniau bendigedig, mae y lliwiau yn hollol naturiol, ac felly'n gweithio'n dda iawn yn rhoi lliw credadwy o'r wlad o'm cwmpas

Friday, 20 January 2012

Dyes from Winter garden 2 : an array of yellows.

The dye plants I had in the garden were Genista tinctoria, Weld ( leaves) Dyers Chamomile and Tansy. I picked what I had,

I cut the plant materials up, soaked overnight added premordanted fibres and heated all of them slowly in a large pan

From left to right Dyers Chamomile Gensita tinctoria, Tansy and Weld


The sunny result-very nice to have in the winter.

As there is only so much yellow a girl can have I put rusty nails into the Genista tinctoria and tansy but in fact these only became a bronze/gold.(Top row), the acid yellow of the weld leaves stands out in the middle and in the fluff of alpaca to the right. There was so much colour in the dyers chamomile that I repeated it and got almost as good a colour the second time ( Alpaca on left hand side)