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 […]
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 […]
I return from many of my walks with pockets full of lichen windfall. One of the common finds under trees is two slightly different species of Hypogymnia, a good dye lichen. ~ Lichen windfall is perfect for dyeing, since it does no damage to just pick up the fallen lichens. I’m therefore writing a small […]
Earthballs contain a yellow-brown dye, but also a large and annoying amount of tiny, black spores. So I set out to find out if the spores contain any dye or if they could just be discarded. ~ A couple of years ago, I dyed a lot of yarn with earthballs. The color turned out a […]
An experiment with yellow to green tones of birch leaves over the summer. I didn’t see any difference, but most experiments do have different outcomes than expected. ~ A fresh new year calls for a new, big series of dye experiments, but I’m going to begin with an old one that was going on for […]
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 […]
Dyer’s polypore is one of the very good dye mushrooms found here in Denmark (and many other places, including the rest of Europe and North America). It grows on dead wood, or parasitically on the roots of living trees. It grows in the same spot year after year, and grows a new fruiting body every […]
Reed flowers are in season! I took the photo above on a beautiful August day at the lake. The sound of the wind through the reeds is positively mind-cleansing, which apparently I’m not the only one to think, judging by the number of YouTube videos of just that phenomenon. So now you too can enjoy […]
Sometimes when I read something and there is one key word that doesn’t compute, it’s like my brain just jumps over the entire topic. Some time ago, searching for information on Xanthoria parietina and its pigment parietin, I came across information on the Rumex family. This is what I wrote back then Parietin, Wikipedia informs […]