Wool dyeing

Nature has such amazing colors and so many gorgeous layers and color combinations. Have you ever wondered if you could dye yarn with a particular herb or other plants nearby you? Growing up I loved to read and in several of my book adventures were people that had created dyes out of the everyday nat

My freezer is littered with avocado pits. My husband, who organizes our small, family of five freezer, (no easy feat) asks me about these pits about every other weekend. Oh – and the look on …

Dyeing wool with bracken to get a range of colours by altering pH and modifying with iron

A couple of weeks ago I came across a blog post which described the dyeing of green on wool with the plumes of common reed! How surprised and excited I was,

"I can't remember a year when the blackberries ripened so early. And there are still plenty more to come. Lovely ones, too." My companion barely spared them a glance, having other fruit in mind. I watched her pick her way up a branch of blackthorn, sheer madness, but you have to admire that kind of commitment to sloe gin. "Mind your fleece on those thorns, Elinor." She waved a hoof and chucked a ripe sloe into the basket. "Who dares, wins, Beaut." I suppose I'm just as fanatical about plant…

Not long ago, I accidentally mordanted some Shetland wool yarn using 20% of the weight of the wool in alum crystals, instead of my usual 10%. I thought the amount of colour the yarn picked up from a dye bath of birch tree leaves looked far more impressive than the colour on a smaller skein of the same yarn that had been dyed in the same bath after being mordanted with 10% alum. Over a cup of tea in the garden, my companion, Elinor Gotland, quite agreed. "The little skein looks crap compared…

This is the question I get the most often: How can I make botanical colors last using natural methods?First of all, we have to define natural. Then, let’s define mordants. I will talk about metal salts, like alum, iron, etc., as well as binders, e.g. soy milk. I am also listing alternative processes, like indigo dyeing, tannins treatment and acid dyeing.To illustrate how different mordants influence color, I dyed a few swatches pre-treated with different natural substances. I used onion…

At the carpet weaving center we visited on our trip to Cappadocia in Turkey this past July. All the wool dyes are made from natural sources of flowers, berries, leaves, and/or bark.

Have you ever wanted to try natural dyeing? It's as easy as raiding your pantry! Check out this step-by-step tutorial for how to dye yarn using black beans to get a gorgeous smokey blue color!