All you need to know to start your dye journey - August 3, 20204
I spent years dyeing with plant dyes. There was always another dye material to use or another fiber to try or another day of dyeing, just for fun.
These gnomes are knitted with some of these yarns.
My dye teacher said: "everything that is free is yellow" so I set out to see and had , at one point over 60 nuances of yellow. Marigolds, Tansys, Onion skins, Carrot tops are just a few ....
To get the red spectrum you have 2 choices, cochineal and madder. Cochineal is a parasite, a lice that lives on cacti and madder is a plant in which you harvest the tubular roots. Cochineal produces the reds on the blue scale and Madder produces the reds on the orange scale.
Here you can see the contrast more clearly
To create greens and purples, I over dyed these colours with indigo, which you can see in the previous post about the indigo dye day.
The above samples are all done on wool...Silk embroidery floss is one of my favourite things to dye as the silk takes on the colours in a subtler way.
Join us for the workshop on Saturday August 3rd. We will be dyeing yellows and reds with both wool and silk
Judith Mueller
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