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 […]
MIDGAARDS HAVE
Summer is leaving us, and I feel like summing up my gardening for the year. I had 2. year woad plants, and just a few plants gave me a big pile of seeds. That’s despite the fact that I moved those plants last fall. This is just some of the seeds. I also grew dyer’s […]
A while ago, I tried the classical combination of indigo and the Japanese technique shibori, for the first – and definitely not last – time. I dyed a handful of cotton t-shirts and shirts from local second-hand shops. Traditionally, arashi shibori was made by tying fabric around a wooden pole. The patterns thus achieved are […]
This summer, I’ve dyed a nice pile of green wool using reed flowers and velvet pax – two dyestuffs that are a highlight of the dyer’s year. Reed flowers because they give such an electric green. You have to admit it’s a bit strange that these red flowers dye wool a wild green, but only […]
This summer passed in a big cloud of rain, which has been lovely for plants and mushrooms that came out early and in huge numbers. We went on lots of day trips, for example Skovsnogen Artspace: My mom has managed to finish a couple of knitting projects with yarn that I’ve dyed. An Elizabeth shawl […]
We recently had a heatwave here in Denmark, so the need arose for a project where you don’t have a huge pile of wool on your lap. I ended up knitting Hado by Olga Buraya-Kefelian, and it was so much fun that I knit three of them. The upper one in yellow/green is wool dyed […]
Finally, the summer holiday is here! I’m going to spend it dyeing (with natural dyes, of course), knitting (with my naturally dyed yarn) and reading (about natural colors, what else??). I just finished reading the Norwegian book “Vaid – En historie om blått” (Woad – A History of Blue) by Anne Sagberg, a well written […]
Woad is flowering right now, in lovely yellow abundance, and I’m hoping for a good seed harvest. Seeing the abundance of flowers made me want to knit with my woad dyed yarn from last year, and so, it’s become part of a whole obsessive-compulsive series of hats that I’m knitting these days, following Olga Buraya-Kefelian’s […]
I finished my Vindauga baby blanket, and it turned out just the way I’d imagined it. In order to break the clean lines a bit, and make the blanket more baby-ish, I decided to use a picot cast-off instead of the usual one. But it turned out to be a problem to find one that […]
Ever since I first read about Saxon blue, produced by reaction indigo with concentrated sulfuric acid, I’ve really wanted to try it. The lawyer Johann Christian Barth is credited with inventing the Saxon blue reaction in 1743. He treated natural indigo with sulfuric acid, then known as “oil of vitriol”. According to de Keijzer, the […]