Bits and Pieces from the Dye Garden

Just to cheer the spirits- a view from our little pond across the grandly named patio or  terrace -really a piece of uneven paving stones to the studio.  Not many dye plants as such although the lilies are  a pleasure however in the immediate foreground is Purple Loostrife Lythrum salicaria just coming into flower, on ne of the plants high in tannin.   The pond is thronged at the moment with birds having sips of water and visiting dogs prefer the pond water to nice clean bowls of water any day.

I had been getting ready for a workshop with a lovely group of ladies known as the Fiesty Felters in Shrewsbury making and painting fine felt with extract dyes.  Here on the line are samples of the ten dyes we used.
Logwood purple, Bodfari green, , Fustic, Annatto, Madder,Pomegrante Lac.Cutch waste,Cochineal and Logwood grey.

The Silk caps were painted with all ten dyes. I didn't have time to take photos of the workshop -but it seemed to go well.  They were nice and very talented bunch who bought  a lot! Particularly my inks .  I sold all I took bar a few bottles and am now completely out of bronze and blue so will need to get going on those.  Both are complicated and take time. 

I said this was a post  was a bits and  pieces! Here are some of the  flowers I have picked to dry.
Top:marigold ( tagetes spp),  Coreopsis spp, Cosmos spp.
And finally a pot of yarrow.  The fibres were a pale yellow. I added a bit of ammonia to brighten the yellow and left it overnight and now it has gone slightly green.  I will rinse it out to day  and see what the colour is then but it looks an intriguing greeny yellow.

Dyeing the Greens

The photo of my samples above also has dyed fibres from half a dozen leaves of Chinese Woad (Isatis Indigotica). The orange fibres were for Dyers Chamomile with a touch of ammonia. The colour was so fabulous none of us wanted to over dye !




Posted by Helen

These last two summers I have run workshops in my studio using dye plants from the garden. This year I could only manage two workshops as I am teaching for a week at the Lincoln summer school for weavers spinners and dyers. The first one which I ran last weekend was Dyeing the Greens (The other is Dyeing the Blues on August 29th) As all natural dyer know greens are rare and even where you can get them they are mostly olive greens and dark greens. So I had great fun devising different ways to get there. We achieved green by modification of yellows from Elderflower leaves ( Sambucus Nigra), Dyers Chamomile (Anthemis Tinctoria), Mullien (Verbascum Thapsus) Yarrow (Achillea Millefolium) Tansy (Tanacetum Vulgare)-this was at the last minute as someone said they had got some green from Tansy leaves -with either ferrous sulphate or copper sulphate made up by dissolving 2 g in 100ml of water (Jenny Dean's recipe). We overdyed Weld (Reseda Luteola) in Indigo, and used Indigo Sulphonate mixed with Fustic extract. Indigo Sulphonate is Indigo dissolved in concentrated Sulphuric acid and was discovered inthe 1700's and is probably one of the first chemical dyes. It is often called saxon blue and while it is not as lightfast as indigo itself it gives a fabulously strong blue with a slight green tinge. I use Jim Liles recipe in the Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing , but Trudy Von Stralen also has one in her book Indigo Madder and Marigold. Finally we ended up by painting some merino tops and silk cap with extracts using green, osage orange and fustic with a little logwood grey to make the green turquoise.
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Dyeing with Yarrow (Achillea Millefolium), Meadowsweet (Filipendula Almaria), Goldenrod (Solidago Canadensis)

Meadow Sweet

Golden Rod
Yarrow with Genista Tinctoria behind and Californian Poppies (not a dye plant to my knowledge) in front
posted by Helen
Yarrow MeadowSweet Golden Rod

All fibres pre mordanted with 8% alum. 7% cream of tartar. Plant material heated slowly overnight with no prior soaking , fibres added which were then heated till no increase in depth of colour. ( 12-24 hours) The Golden Rod was in a stainless steel pan on an electric ring at it lowest setting. The other two were in electric casseroles on low or keep warm settings which keeps the liquid at roughly 80 degrees C so well below boiling. I picked a 100g of yarrow and meadow sweet which have dyed about 50g of wool but the golden rod is a rolling dye bath. I add more flower heads when the resulting colour looks a bit pale and it has now been going for about a week.