Drying strips of rhubarb skin for making cordage

A digital colour palette based on scans of natural ink samples

Pleased to announce I’ve finally finished my embroidered garden map! It was hard to know when it was complete - very tempting to keep tinkering and adding features. All the fabric, thread and yarn used has been naturally dyed, mostly from plants and trees in the garden itself. A pleasing symmetry. I’ve really enjoyed working on this, and especially liked using single strands of yarn for the embroidery – this enabled me to expand the colour palette as the naturally dyed embroidery thread is a lot more limited in its range.

The rhubarb is in full flow in the garden – particularly after all the rain we’ve had this month – so I decided to strip some skin from stalks to dry for making cordage. It will be interesting to see if the pink colour lasts once it’s dried.

My natural dyeing experiments have slowed down considerably as there’s more need to be actually gardening at this time of year – I think it’s best suited to autumn and winter. I had some purple hazel leaves trimmed from stakes I used to make a sweet pea wig wam recently, so I decided to see what colour could be extracted. Nothing amazing, but a nice range of natural colour.

May 28 marked a whole year since my first natural dyeing experiment. I laid out all of my dye sample cards to mark the occasion with a photo to mark my progress. It’s been such an enjoyable rabbit hole to have fallen down, and learning through doing is always my favourite way to pick up new skills. There are precious few upsides to a global pandemic, but the increased amount of time I’ve had at home through all of the various lockdowns has afforded me the space to explore something that has fascinated me for a long time.

And finally, a digital colour palette based upon scans of my natural ink samples… I’m not sure exactly what I’ll do with this, but I’m hoping it will help me to bridge the visual gap between my analogue and digital work.