Nettles

Ethel Mairet gave lists of British dye plants by colour in her book. There were hardly any plants at all listed under the colour 'green'. Instead, she pointed out that most dyers obtain green by dyeing their fibre with yellow and then over-dying it with indigo or woad. So now I know!

However, I managed to obtain some quite interesting 'greenish' tones from nettles the other day. I gathered them from the churchyard meadow adjacent to my allotment. I boiled them and then left them to steep for 24 hours, before straining them and preparing a dye bath using my usual method with four skeins. From the left, mordanted with alum, copper, alum and tin and alum and iron respectively.