DYEING DAY

Last Saturday (actually it's a few weeks back now - pre Irish break) our guild held a natural dyeing day at one of our members houses. The weather was a little unpredictable so, instead of dyeing and spinning in the garden, we were housed in two barns - one for dyeing and one for spinning, chatting, eating and general conviviality. There was a good turn out and we also had visitors from the Mid Herts guild which was really nice.

We arrived in the morning and got ourselves settled in with tea and coffee and some wonderful home made biscuits - yumm. Then the mordant baths were set up and we all put various bits and pieces into each bath - four mordants were used - alum, chrome, copper and tin. These were then left to work and we went off and spun or knitted or socialised or all three. I had a sock knitting lesson - which was great fun and I may have a new obsession gripping me now!

After lunch various dye baths were brewed including coccineal, cota, bracket fungus (don't know which one) hollyhock, comfrey, coreopsis, dyers chamomile and maybe a few others - actually I wasn't paying proper attention as I picked three dye baths only, and then went back to sock knitting and yattering. I had some super wash merino and silk fleece which I split and put into the coreopsis and cota dye baths and I also had some alpaca, silk and wool fleece which I put into the cochineal dye bath. In the afternoon the tea and coffee came around again - this time with the most amazing cakes - I was briefly sent to heaven with a chocolate muffin stuffed with cream and jam.

I wasn't totally happy with the coreopsis samples, so I've over dyed one piece with some ancient dye bath which I'd had in the garden - I think it may have been madder - it was a little pungent and it came up a warm brown which I was quite pleased with - I'm planning to over dye another couple of bits - hopefully with a very fresh madder dyebath - perhaps next weekend when we get back from Ireland - I'm hoping that I'll get a stronger orange - can only try.

sadly I have no pics of the actual day as my batteries were out of power - lack of planning and forethought there!

I'd hoped to post this earlier but life is a little busy right now - my in-laws have just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary so it's been a very family oriented time with my niece and nephews over from Canada and brother & sister in law over from Paris and the celebrating and general getting together. Then my own father will be visiting later this week, in order to go to the cricket at the oval with my hubby. All of this means that housework needs to take precedence over spinning (and blogging) - how dull!

WHOLLY HERBS AT WEST DEAN

Every year in May our guild is invited down to West Dean Gardens to demonstrate natural dying at their Wholly Herbs weekend. This was our 4th year there and four of us (plus one hubby) went 'down south' for the weekend - full of anticipation for another two days of playing with fibre and yarn.

The first of the two days was fairly grey and misgog and consequently quiet - We had a good day though with some pleasing results - in particular we were delighted with the rich, warm oranges and rusty colours on the batch of yarns that came out of the coreopsis dye bath.

There is a lot of preparation done in advance of the show, growing dye plants to sell, preparing kits for people to try spinning and dying, and skeining wool and mordanting it ready to be dyed at the show. One of our members skeined 30 sets of skeins, 5 in a batch mordanted with - alum, chrome, copper and tin plus one un-mordanted which we afterbath with iron. This means that we put 5 skeins into each dye bath and get 5 different colours out of each single dye bath.

The second day was a sunny spring day and there were a lot more people many of whom were very well informed and extremely interested. We also started an indigo vat on the second day and dyed several batches of un-mordanted wool yarn and fibre - and a pair of cotton trousers!

Among the dyes used were Avocado skins, weld, coreopsis, madder, rooibosh, daffodils, cow parsley, nettle, hopi black sunflower seeds, logwood, yorkshire gold tea, dyers chamomile, rhubarb root, juniper berries, dried lavender and several others that I can't call to mind.

I now have quite a bit of work to do as it is my job to turn all those skeins into a sampler for next years show - I crochet them up into 5 colour medallions which become, when joined, a sort of mini throw to go on our show table - the first two years I used a hexagonal patten from the harmony crochet book - last year, and probably this year too, I used a square pattern.

This year I thought about things in advance and got some fibre lined up ready mordanted with alum in 10g batches to go in some of the dye baths. I also had some un-mordanted fibre for the indigo vat. We achieved some lovely colours in both yarn and fibre and had a generally good time talking to people and visiting the other stands. It's also nice to meet up with people that we've seen in previous years - it's getting to be quite a little community in it's own right -in fact I'm already looking forward to next year.