Natural Dye Experiments 2011

These are some of my experiments with natural dye NZ spring 2011.

I used:

extracts of - indigo, cochineal, logwood.

From my garden  - woad, weld, coreopsis, gum. I also used onion and a mix of onion and tumeric.

The first time I used the fresh woad I did a natural fermentation with yeast and although it was a nice blue when it first came out of the vat it quicky changed to a very light mauve/pink/blue colour.  The second time I used the chemical with good results.  Next time I want to use a natural vat again.

This yellow is from my weld.

I made these slippers using the mauve woad merino inside and logwood outside.  The light colour has "faded" the logwood!

Felt Slipper & Natural Dye Workshop - LLama Conf. 2012

I was asked to teach on how to make felted slippers.
I offered to bring a pot of silver gum leaves to demonstrate an easy method of natural dyeing.



Here you can see the leaves bundled into a muslin bag.  They were soaked overnight in filtered water.

I gathered the leaves a couple of weeks ago after a long dry spell.

At the workshop we added samples of raw llama suri locks and raw alpaca fleece.  You can see in the picture the beautiful brick red! 

The ladies brought their own gorgeous soft llama fleece and suri locks.  I was concerned that it would be difficult to felt with but you can see that they had no problems even though some had applied some fairly thick suri locks!  Here you will see some examples of the partially completed slippers.  

A great bunch, great results and a fun time!

Autumn is here and I have tidied up my felting room!  Today I am taking a workshop on felted slippers for the llama Conference.  Slippers and boots are not my passion but I think maybe I could get into making some cutsie slippers - watch this space!