a wood of cherries

A few years ago, 4 actually, I started to execute a long held interest in natural dyeing.

I tried a few different mordants on a selection of fabrics that I had to hand at the time.  The mordants help the dye stuffs bond with the fibres.  This Cherry bark was a pig to process, very tough to break up and after soaking a few days I seemed to get not very much colour.  My first "natural dye" experiment wasn't impressing me.  Deciding to leave the bark to soak a little while longer, I stashed the fabrics and put it all on hold.

Well life happened and I painted and did fibre stuff and forgot about my mouldy old bark soaking away...

for FOUR years!!

A few days ago I found that old tub again and bounced back into action, retrieved my equipment that had scattered into new purposes and gathered my thoughts into reading up on "where on earth do I start?".

In those four years I'd progressed from fabrics to wool fibres and learnt to spin so wool was "the new black" and having conquered taming wild raw fleece into nice fluffy clouds and spinning up a decent yarn, I was ready to start back on the dyeing front.

This is raw jacobs fleece spun and plied into a chunky yarn.  With this out of the way I can start the natural dye experiments.

. . . to be continued

Thought for today...  We create our own magic