July Dyeing day

As mentioned the other day, Winterbourne hold

the National Collection of Anthemis:

In case you wonder, as I did, just what it means to hold the National Collection, this is what is written on the notice at Winterbourne:

"The Plant Heritage mission is to encourage the conservation of cultivated plants in the British Isles, preserving our magnificent plant heritage and educating the public in the importance of cultivated plant conservation.  The National Plant Collections Scheme aims to create and maintain 'living libraries' or individual species cared for by dedicated specialist growers, individuals or organisations."

More details of National Collections can be found here:  http://www.nccpg.com/National-Collections.aspx - including a list of endangered plants - important to know if you want to collect dye plants from the wild.

So, this months dye plants are: Anthemis Tinctoria (Dyers' Chamomile) and another Anthemis (with pale yellow flowers - see photo), Nepeta (Catmint) and bracken.

The gardeners had kindly collected the two different lots of Anthemis flowers separately, so we made up two different dye baths to see if there was a difference.  The colours are beautiful and, as you can see from the photograph below, there is not a great difference (the Anthemis are the 10 skeins starting on the left).  The Tinctoria is a slightly clearer yellow and the skein modified with iron is darker.  The lovely golds are the skeins modified with washing soda.

The middle section shows the Nepeta dyed wool and this month's surprise came from the bracken which gave us the lovely greens!  It will be interesting to see how stable the colours remain.

Anthemis flowers:

They can be used fresh or dry.  We used just the flower heads with the stalks.

The Anthemis also gave good yellows on cotton mordanted with aluminium acetate:  basic colour on the left, modified with washing soda (alkali) on the right.

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Lola inspecting the catmint: