Tag: pink

POKEBERRY INK

This year was my first cultivating pokeberry in my dye garden. The small harvest, just a handfull of berries, turned into a fancy hot pink ink. The pokeberry plant (Phytolacca americana) grows as a weed in the eastern US, where the poisonous plant used to be eaten by poor people, who boiled it in several […]

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Red Madder

Madder is one of the most ancient dyes, and one that is described in pretty much any book on natural dyeing. But every book seems to give a slightly different method for obtaining the sought-after madder red. There’s only one thing to do – experiment! Madder was one of the first natural dyestuffs I tried […]

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Lichen Windfall

Lichen windfall is perfect for natural dyeing, since it does no harm to pick up the fallen ones, they will no longer grow. One of the most common and easy-to-recognize lichens in windfall is Ramalina fastigiata. ~ When walking outside on rainy, windy days, I very often find lots of lichens scattered on the ground […]

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Vindauga Baby

The design theme from my Vindauga Blanket just stayed in my brain after I knit the first one, demanding to be knit in more variations! And when that design theme met with my experiments in 2-dimensional gradients (or matrices), the result was the Vindauga Baby Blanket, which I’ve finally managed to publish the pattern for. […]

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Mushroom Dyeing of 2015

2015 is history, and it’s now 2016, but I think there’s just time to show you my mushroom dyeing of 2015, which brought a quite nice mushroom harvest. Fall is my favorite time of year. Always has been. It’s the colors, the scents, and the long forest walks. We go to the same plantation in […]

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Jars of Lichens

Lichen dyeing is a slow discipline – the slowness only surpassed by the pace that the lichens themselves grow at… I started two jars of lichens late in February, one with Evernia prunastri (left) and one with Ramalina fastigiata – at least, I’m fairly sure that’s what it is (right). It’s important to mention how […]

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Avocado, Meet Blender

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 […]

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Avocado Peels

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. […]

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The Faintest Pink

Once your eye adapts to spotting lichens, there is one in particular that beckons to you from just about everywhere – bright yellow Xanthoria parietina, growing on stones, fences, and branches. It’s even in my holiday snapshots from last year, taken at Dybbøl, where the Germans beat the Danish army back to the stone age […]

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Solving the Problem of Beige

My recent attempt at dyeing with fermented avocado pits was only partially successful – I got three nice pink-ish test skeins out of it (on the left, dry) but two skeins of sock yarn came out a drab beige (still in the pot, so wet, which makes the color look nicer than it is) So […]

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