These beautiful stately plants with their long, grey green leaves and clouds of yellow flowers have always been slightly illusive to me – promising colour but always slightly slipping away when I try to convert their promise into dye, always sticking a little too yellow or losing their blue rather quicker than I would like.

I’ve kept an indigo bath for years – always added to and rarely cleared out in which I dye metres and metres of linen and hemp. But the indigo I have traditionally used are the cakes of tropical indigo you can get from places like Cloth House. I follow a recipe, I like to think – given to me by Phyllis Barron. It’s a photocopy of her typewritten recipe that I found at her archive in Farnham.

But my woad plants were always there – reminding me of another kind of blue and offering me something I know will be special and most especially an opportunity to discover something new and ancient. So I was thrilled to harvest my woad and join lovely Debbie Manson & Clare O’Leary over in Lewes for a lovely day of woad dyeing – plus so thrilling to leave Steyning!!

I wanted to share the process we shared together with you. If you are a beginner or maybe already had a go with woad, I thought you might find it interesting.

1. I harvested my woad fresh from the allotment. First we shredded the fresh leaves & stood the shredded leaves in boiling water for around an hour.

2) Next we strained off the liquid and shifted the PH of the bath to make it more alkali PH8/9. We did this using Soda Ash. A successful indigo bath must be alkali – this is one of it’s key characteristics

3) Next, we aerated the bath – essentially introduced more oxygen by pouring it from bucket to bucket. We did this for about 15 minutes until the bath was nice and foamy and blue.

4) Finally we used a teaspoon of Sodium Hydrosylphite to remove the oxygen and create our lovely yellow dye bath.

We left the bath to rest for about half an hour before introducing the cloth.

5) These were left in the bath for at least 10 minutes before being removed and quickly placed in a bath of cold water and vigorously agitated – does that make sense?

As we did this – the cloth turned properly blue and seemed to fix really well. So a brilliant idea – thank you Clare!

And a BIG thank you to Debbie for welcoming us into her wonderful workshop garden studio – our time together was really joyful collaboration, play & togetherness.

The post Beautiful Woad appeared first on Sarah Burns Patterns.

In the meantime I was thinking about all the really great plants much closer to home which can also make gorgeous colours. I thought I would share some of these ordinary wonderful things with you and show you how you could – very simply make lovely colours from these very common plants.

Here are a few plants which I hope you can get hold of really easily –

From left to right: Dock Leaves, Cow Parsley, Willow leaves and St Johns Wort stalks (that’s the plant with the pretty yellow flowers, also known as Hypericum. It’s leaves have got a very distinctive spicy sweet smell)

If you don’t have a garden I hope you can ask a friend or neighbour if they maybe have some or take a sneaky handful from the park.

All you need to make your natural dyes apart from the plant matter is some fabric and a pot to cook them up in.

First roughly chop up your leaves and stalks with a pair of scissors

Next – grab a pot. You can use one from the kitchen because non of these leaves are harmful and you can give the pot a good scrub out afterwards.

Next – Fill the pot with hot water and bring to the boil. Then reduce the heat and keep on a low simmer.

Now we can prepare your fabric. I’ve used little squares of calico – it’s just been washed. I haven’t used any mordants or anything special beforehand. You can use any spare cotton, linen or silk that you have to hand – just make sure it’s washed and clean.

Wet your fabric first before adding it to the dye bath.

Keep your dye bath hot and keep adding water so that it doesn’t boil dry. Do take the pot off the heat, for example overnight and just let the fabric steep in the dye – this is a great way to extract the colour.

After 24 hours your fabric should look something like this – the Dock leaves have turned the square of calico brown, the Cowparsley has dyed the fabric an almost illuminous yellow, the Willow leaves have given pink and the St John’s Wort stems a lovely browny red.

To finish off – run your fabric under the tap until the water runs clear. This way you know that any excess dye has been removed.

The process is slow but super simple. Once you’ve had a play with little scraps of fabric you could try larger pieces to make handkerchiefs, scarves, napkins, pillowcases….

And you could try leaving the fabric in for even longer – this is really SLOW textiles and the slower you go the better the result.

I do hope this blog makes sense and gives you clear step by step instructions for  dyeing your own fabric with common garden plants – please get in touch if you have any questions.

I really hope you have a go and please let me know how you get on – your results may not be the same as mine as different soils and weathers have an effect on the plant material but I hope you get something that you like X

Have fun X

The post Have a go at Natural Dyeing using common garden plants appeared first on Sarah Burns Patterns.