I've been dyeing wool fleece and yarn for years. I began my ...shall I call it an obsession...when I was studying to become a Waldorf School Handwork teacher. I was fascinated by the variety of colour you could get by just dyeing plant material. I read all the books and for a whole year I dyed only things I could find....leaves, bark, flowers, lichens.. By this time, I had over 60 shades of yellow.and then I branched out into madder and cochineal and added the reds and the pinks.
My first indigo recipe was complicated but once I mastered it I finally had a whole range of colours including the greens blues and the purples.
It's not that easy, you have to dye enough of the yellows and pinks to get the greens and the purples.....It just seemed I never had enough.
So now, quite a few years later...I begin again. This time I am using superwash merino from Louet and 10 skeins later all I have are 1 of a kinds. Nothing to add to the madder or the indigo....Oh well...the next time will be different again.
