I've set myself a 'house rule' that if I'm growing it, I can dye with it, but that I don't need to gather everything from my own garden. That makes sense with plants like madder that take years to mature, or like weld where one needs a great deal of dyestuff to make up a batch ready for over-dyeing with woad. I have several dyer's chamomile plants in my garden, but they are newly-planted and obviously not in flower yet, so I used dried flowers bought from Fiery Felts at Wonderwool Wales for my latest dye bath. I dyed some chamomile earlier in the year and the results were disappointingly drab apart from the skein dyed with alum+tin.
This time, the results were far better. As this set will be over-dyed later (if I can resist using them as they are) the skein on the left is un-mordanted, and the rest have been mordanted with alum, copper and alum + tin. This experiment just goes to show what a difference the raw materials make to the end result, as everything else about the process was standard.
No comments:
Post a Comment