Yew Trimmings

Yesterday, 3rd January 2017, I prepared some yew wood for the dye pot. Our local church, All Saints' Loughton, has some yew trees in its churchyard that were planted to mark the beginning of the twentieth century. They are just about visible in the photo. They overhang Church Lane. A few weeks ago, a large lorry tried to squeeze down the lane, and in so doing it ripped away a large branch, which my husband (a Churchwarden) retrieved and brought home to burn on our open fire. Apparently, yew burns hot and bright! yesterday morning, I managed to pare off  350 grams of yew bark and soft wood with a sharp kitchen knife.

In her 'A Dyer's Manual' (1982) Jill Goodwin suggests that yew yields pink, red or orange, which would make perfect sense as, when I pared away the bark and outer layer of soft wood, it was pale pink in colour. The heartwood was orange, but the branch was so heavy, dense and strong that I had no hope of reaching that. Jenny Dean does not mention yew in her book, but I found a piece by her on the Internet which suggests pouring boiling water over the chipping, leaving them to soak overnight and then boiling for an hour. The resulting liquid can be strained, poured off into a dye bath to dye wool mordanted with alum by simmering it for 45 minutes or so.

The Winterbourne Dyers took a slightly different approach in that they simmered their yew twigs for three days in a slow cooker to release the dye. I decided to adopt that strategy as I could leave the pot to stew away quietly in the greenhouse while I got on with some mordanting. However, I started the process with boiling water, to speed things up a bit. When I looked in on the brew this morning, it was bubbling away nicely and the water had turned a rich orange, so fingers crossed!