Week twelve

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!

Week ten

Truly natural colour – squezed from a squishy pelargonium stalk

Homemade ink sketches of shadows in the garden on a rare sunny day

Dye results from hazel catkins – an unexpectedly wide range of colours

More of an inky week… I’ve enjoyed using my homemade inks to draw another garden map, and also some sketches from photos of shadows in the garden on a rare sunny Spring day. It will be interesting to see if the colour will change over time. I was pruning my pelargoniums after re-potting them and noticed that a dark coloured liquid was oozing out of a particularly squishy stem - I squeezed it onto watercolour paper and was very surprised by the range of tones and intensity of colour when it dried. I was very pleased with the results of dyeing with hazel catkins - very plentiful in the garden at the moment. The colour was almost as strong on the cotton and linen as on the yarn and woollen blanket squares, and it shifted to a lovely dark brown with iron oxide. I’m guessing this indicates the presence of tannins, but botany is not my strong point. I’m going to dye a larger piece of woollen blanket as I’d like to try some embroidery with my dyed threads.

Week eight

Starting to crochet up small squares of dyed yarn to create a sampler

Results of dyeing with Hypericum (St John’s Wort) – a good range of colour, much stronger on wool

Finished my stitched fabric collage - bit wonky but good to see what colours go together

A welcome injection of colour – cranberries in the dye pot

Printing my woodcut

February’s daily drawings complete… a month of line drawings with flowers starting to make an appearance towards the end

Felt like the start of Spring this week… mornings are still cold and frosty, but sunshine and blue skies during the day really lifted the spirits. Quite a bit of dyeing going on in the background - should be able to show the results next week… I’m hoping some of the vibrant pink from frozen cranberries left over from Christmas will remain after rinsing. I’ve enjoyed making more rubber stamps to experiment with pattern - I’m going to try to do at least one of these each month so I have a set of patterns by the end of the year. I finished stitching onto my collage of fabric offcuts - it’s pretty rough around the edges, but I quite like the mark making of the stitches, and it’s good to start working with some of the dyed materials and see how the colours work alongside each other. I’ve also started crocheting some small swatches of the dyed yarn (remembering to label them as I go!) so that I can eventually put together a sampler. I completed my month of daily line drawings… it was interesting to see more flowers appearing by the last week of February, so that should bring more inspiration for future months.

Week three

Collaging with offcuts from paper used to test homemade ink samples

Speed drawing exercise (herb bed in my garden)

Collage made from speed drawing (above)

Red cabbage ink - pink when it hits the paper, but teal 10 minutes later. Magic!

Starting to catalogue and record results for my natural dyeing experiments.

A productive week in spite of the rain and being busy with design work. I’m starting to get into a habit of making artwork first thing in the morning before work and then doing more mindful/mindless tasks (see dye sample cards above) in the evenings when watching TV. I’ve really enjoyed starting to use my inks - the speed drawing used mint ink - and also creating collages with offcuts. I’m always happiest with the most random results. It was fun making and weaving on a tiny pin loom, and I’m keen to explore this further to make samples of the dyed yarn. Good to finally start to catalogue my dye samples… very pleasing to make the swatch cards, and I think they will be a really useful record.