Category: ROADSIDE

Tansy Experiments

Among some natural dyers, tansy is seen as quite boring. It’s a common plant, easy to find, easy to dye with, and it contains the so-common yellow – just like so many other plants. But tansy has a long cultural history, and its yellow dye is of high quality! ~ Tansy’s common name is simply […]

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Spring Cleaning

In the summer, when all the plants stand tall, I usually collect good bundles of tansy, yarrow, and other wild dye plants. And they have to go before the next harvest. ~ My dyestuff stores from last year contained big bundles of mugwort and tansy, a smaller amount of yarrow, a box full of dry […]

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Amazing Dyeing Failures 2

The topic of my last post was failures in dyeing, and here’s more. First, my most serious and most annoying failure as a natural dyer. 3: Organic Indigo Failure A while back, I experimented a bit with an indigo vat with fructose, but my results were not very convincing, in the sense that the amount […]

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Curly Dock Mordant

Dock or sorrel are useful plants for mordanting – this was a fact that I’d gotten from reading and made a mental note of. I couldn’t remember where I read it, so I decided to just go ahead and try it. I picked curly (or curled) dock (Rumex crispus) in the roadside around July-August. Curly […]

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Summer Days Dyeing

Summer finally came roaring with several days of temperatures around 30C (yea, hot for Denmark!). We’ve been outside almost all the time, except the times I’ve had to go into the house and check my dye pot on the stove. Our garden is wonderful right now, the highlights are Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus) flowering thyme […]

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Wild Chervil and Intentionally Wild

The other day, we went for a walk along the road, and found wild chervil growing bountifully, so it’s certainly lucky that I have such a good little helper for these tasks: I picked 180 g of stalks with flowers, which I boiled immediately for an hour or so. Next day, when the extract had […]

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My Ancient Fashion Colors

I am knitting a very nice little shawl, Fylleryd by Mia Rinde, out of a skein of my new lace yarn, Norne (100% wool, 640m/100g). It’s dyed with a somewhat exhausted madder dyebath: I like this color. I think it’s vibrant and will make a flattering shawl. But I was surprised when, a couple of […]

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A Gradient in Madder and Tansy

I love color gradients! They somehow make the colors pop in a different way! Some of the individual colors in my gradient hat were not remotely exciting, but together, it’s another story. I kept imagining a warm gradient, from red to yellow. Sometimes such daydreams stay just that, but with this, I have come incredibly […]

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