Results of dye experiments with achillea (yarrow)
More iterations of my garden map - breaking down areas into different pencil marks
Edging towards moving the garden map into stitch – selecting naturally dyed fabric to use
Typing labels for natural ink samples I’m making into a flag book
The final week of my online tapestry weaving workshop (run by Jackie Bennett)
A week of continuing with different projects. Natural dye experiments with rhubarb and achillea yielded very different colour palettes. I collected the flowerheads from the achillea last autumn, and dried them for a few months. It seemed a good time to make some dye with them as I planted out some new plants this week. I really like the soft greens, and I hope to be able to make a bigger batch later in the year. Rhubarb root was the first thing I dyed with (at the end of May last year - how quickly I’ve fallen down this particular rabbithole!) I enjoyed dyeing yarns and threads as well as fabric, and it was good to see the wider range you can get by using washing soda or wood ash to make the colour more pinky/orange, or the iron oxide which pushes it into the brown spectrum.
I did a bit more work on developing my garden map - after reducing the different areas of the garden down to pencil marks, I decided to make the jump into turning this into a stitched map. I’ve made a selection of naturally dyed cotton lawn – with the exception of a small square of red cabbage dyed fabric, this is all sourced from plants in my garden, which has a pleasing symmetry.
I’m making a flag book of my ink samples, and have been typing up labels to go on the back of the flags, so it should be a useful reference source (with the colour protected from light in a closed book format).
This week was the last of the four online weaving workshops I’ve been doing with Jackie Bennett, organised by the Bristol Folk House. I’ve really enjoyed them, and have learnt a lot, but I think that Zoom is not perhaps the best medium for learning a practical skill from scratch. I’m hoping to carry on developing what I’ve learnt though, so that eventually I can start weaving with yarn I’ve dyed myself. Good to have a end goal in mind, even if it does feel a little ambitious at this stage!