July is usually the main season for both wild and cultivated dye plants. This year, the extremely hot and dry summer has been challenging for many plants. In early June, we moved into our large, new house. There’s plenty of room for my dye workshop (and the rest of the family), but the garden is […]
The Folkvang pattern was inspired by Bohus knitting, but its clean lines represent a great simplification. Today, the time has finally come to release the mitten pattern. “But it’s March” you say? “It’s still cold!”, Unstable Polar Vortex replies. ~ I while back, I released the pattern for my Folkvang Tam: So now, the time […]
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 […]
One of the great things about natural dyeing is that you can keep overdyeing until you get the color you want. ~ I recently dug out some green skeins of Norne that were not exactly what I had imagined, and had been sitting in the storage basket for a while. I decided to overdye them […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Today, I’ve sown some of my dye plant seeds in small pots indoors. The night frost has almost gone, you see… Last year, I had luck growing Japanese indigo and woad from seeds that I cultivated indoors before planting outside, so I’ll do the same again with Japanese indigo this year. I’m skipping woad because […]