The summer of 2017 was cold and wet in Denmark, and gave way to a fall season with an abundance of dye mushrooms. 2018 is already getting old, but I haven’t finished dyeing with all my mushrooms from 2017 until now. 2017 was a really good year for dye mushrooms. And edible ones, too. In […]
Madder has several relatives that are also rich in useful reds. These plants are native here in Denmark, and have been used as red dyes a very long time back. Believe it or not, the year is drawing to a close. So, I want to try to summarize all the many dyeing experiments I did […]
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 […]
Quite a while ago, I knit this little pincushion, the physical evidence of my experiments with an organic indigo vat. It’s knit in Fenris 100% wool, 450 m/100 g. The pattern is free, Peerie Pin Cushion by Ellen Kapusniak. You’re supposed to sew it together, but I, of course, grafted it closed. I normally use […]
I’m still busy digesting all the impressions from our trip to Japan, and I wrote about our visit to Tezomeya and Avril here. But I think the highlight of the trip in terms of natural dyeing was our visit to Aizen Kobo. It was a rainy day (and it seems that when it rains in […]
Remember these jars? They had been fermenting for over a week, and the color of the liquid didn’t change over the last days, so I decided it was time to try them. The front jar contains the pit and peel from 1 avocado and 1 Tsp salt, the other one the same with the addition […]
My experiments in dyeing with avocado pits were quite successful if I do say so myself (although a couple of skeins needed a little boost of cochineal). But what about the peels? They can also be used for dyeing, and since I remembered reading that they give a slightly different shade, I kept them separate. […]