Dyeing Day -June 2021

​Saturday June 12th was a special day for our guild. At last we were able to meet face to face again! Thank you Sarah for again offering your garden for our Dyers Picnic. This is a biannual event and we had a few changes to make it Covid safe. Rather than the usual bring and share lunch we each brought our own food and drink and the weather was kind so we spent the day in Sarah's garden.

Members took part in natural dyeing and acid dyeing. Rachel led the acid dyeing and some of us used long skeins of sock wool to dye in various different ways. Some people chose to dip their wool into 4 different pots, others painted theirs in rainbow colours. The skeins were wrapped in clingfilm to be microwaved later. They have to be left to cool completely and not unwrapped until the next morning (very important!) I hope everyone followed these instructions and were not too impatient to check out their results!

Sarah used her dyeing equipment and gas stoves to dye with a large variety of natural dyes in the open air. We used daffodils, madder, lichen, wellingtonia bark, cochineal, logwood, onion skins, avocado pits, birch bark, annatto and indigo. One thing that was very noticeable this year was the difference in dye colours on different fibres. Some wools were noticeably better in dye take up. Gemma's Corriedale produced lovely clear colours while my Leicester Longwool was much paler. Sarah's wool blanket squares were also excellent. Birch bark is meant to give a pinkish colour but we only got dull yellows. I spent ages chopping and soaking and heating it but wasn't very excited about the results. I found some old birch branches on a walk and spent a lot of time scraping off the bark. Maybe it was too old to be useful.