I had a wonderful day in Suffolk yesterday on a dye workshop at The Natural Dye Studio. This is the showroom at The Natural Dye Studio showing all her wonderful yarns -

This was the first workshop Amanda had run and there were 5 of us eager to learn everything she had to tell us! The first thing we did was collect our materials for some “hedgerow dyeing” - here we are cutting Cow Parsley and Nettles

after collecting the plants we had to cook them up to release the colour - both plants should give a yellow dye

This is Amanda filling one of her dye baths (which some of you may notice are 35 litre tea urns) with water

Amanda only uses only natural dyes and mordants, nothing that will be harmful to either the environment or herself - the mordants she uses are Alum, Cream of Tartar, Tannin and Washing Soda and for dyeing she uses only natural plants such as Alkanet (a native British plant), Madder (the root of a plant used since ancient times) and Weld (another British plant which grows alongside motorways)

For the dyeing workshop we used -

• Brazilwood- red
• Indigo - blue
• Nettles - yellow
• Cow Parsley - yellow

Once the nettles and the cow parsley had cooked up for a while we strained out the vegetable matter

and then returned the, now coloured, water to the heat adding the yarn we were to dye to simmer in the pans. The nettles produced a wonderful yellow dye and we continued to get colour from them all afternoon. The cow parsley was a little disappointing only giving a very pale yellow - this is one of the issues with using natural dyes from hedgerows etc, so many things can affect the colour, weather, age of the plant when you pick it, soil…..but it makes it quite exciting to experiment.

The yarn in the middle here was dyed with the cow parsley, the red was dyed in Madder.

We all had great fun and started experimenting with dip-dyeing -  here are all our skeins of yarn hanging over the indigo dye bath to dye just one end….

some of us tried tie-dying, over-dying one colour with another- I think we all quickly got caught up in Amanda’s obvious enthusiasm for dying and began looking excitedly to see what colour was coming out of the dye bath next! From just three dyes - we produced a huge range of colours, shades and patternings

One of the most interesting things is how different yarns take up the colour differently so mohair and blue faced leicester placed in the same dye bath for the same length of time come out different shades.

The indigo is fascinating, it’s an eastern plant and one of the oldest recorded dye plants. It is mentioned as a colour chosen for the Tabernacle of the Arc of the Covenant and some of the oldest scraps of fabric are dyed with it and it was the original dye for denim. Woad, which was used by the ancient Britons, produces the same chemical dye compound.

Indigo is water insoluble and so to dye with it you must make it undergo a chemical change - when a dyed fabric is removed from the dyebath the indigo oxidises and reverts to it’s insoluble form, which is why the blue dye in jeans rubs off onto your skin or your furniture. The earliest method used to dye with indigo was to mix it with stale urine - luckily we now have other additives which remove the oxygen so we didn’t have to go the stale urine route!!! Once the indigo has become soluble by removal of the oxygen from the water, the dye bath turns green. The yarn to be dyed has to be introduced carefully to avoid making bubbles and then removed carefully. As it emerges from the dye bath it is green and then it magically turns blue as it oxidises.

I had a really lovely day and would highly recommend a visit to Suffolk to see Amanda, she is so passionate about dyeing that you can’t help but come away enthused and inspired. Here are the yarns I dyed during the day -

From left to right - merino chunky dyed with Brazilwood, BFL dyed with Indigo and Brazilwood, BFL dyed with Nettles, Mohair Loop dyed with Indigo and then overdyed with Brazilwood, BFL dyed with cow parsley.

I’m off to collect plants now to try some more dyeing…..

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