Who doesn’t love the gorgeous shades of copper, red and gold of autumn beech leaves? I wanted to see if I could maybe capture some of that glorious coppery goodness in my dyebath, so I scooped up a big bag of fallen leaves from the wood near my house and put then to soak in […]
I’d been wanting to try dyeing with alder cones for a while as I’d read you could get shades of dark grey through to almost black with them. Did I get that? No I did not… I managed to forage about 150g of alder cones and soaked them for a week. The water was already […]
I was pleased with the results of my acorn dyeing so decided to try some oak leaves. In her book “Wild Color”, Jenny Dean shows the oak leaves producing a variety of shades from tan through mustard-yellow to khaki. This being November, the oak leaves I gathered were brown, dry, crispy and fallen from the […]
Since the previous dyeing experiment with acorns was so happy I collected another batch (it’s been a fantastic year for acorns! The squirrels are going to be very fat and happy!) and dyeing up a couple of skeins of DROPS Flora off-white yarn (wool/alpaca blend). This time the acorns were soaked for 6 days. On […]
It’s been a great year for acorns. When I went for a walk in the local park a little while back, the oak trees were heavy with them, and fallen acorns thickly littered the paths. Oak trees are native to the British Isles, and their acorns were used by the Vikings and Anglo Saxons to […]
My garden patch of dyer’s chamomile has produced so many flowers this year, I decided to use some more of them. I’d read that using a yellow dye on a grey yarn would produce green so as I had a spare skein of DROPS Flora pale grey merino/alpaca yarn left over from a sweater that […]