Plant Dyed Wool: Day 1

For Christmas last year my sweetie of a husband gave me the gift of a three day wool dyeing course with the amazing Jane Meredith. Nine months later I cashed in, and have just returned from a blissful long weekend in Herefordshire learning plant dyeing, carding, spinning, weaving and felting. It was completely enlightening and inspiring, and I came home with a beautiful brown fleece, a new Brinkley loom and a bunch of stuff that I made under Jane's expert tutelage.

Below are images from Day 1, was primarily about dyeing. Jane grows the dye plants in her own garden, and all of the wool you see pictured here was colored using these (apart from the indigo bath, which was synthetic, as indigo only grows in very hot climates). Among the plants we used were marigold, madder root, coreopsis, walnut leaves, damsons, dyers chamomile, woad and bilberries. As the wool was drying, Jane showed us how to examine and select a wool fleece (turns out the ones in my shed are pretty useless, as they come from sheep bred primarily for eating), gave a lesson in carding and demonstrated spinning on both a drop spindle loom and a wheel. Because Jane packs so much into each six and a half hour day, I'm dividing this post into three parts. Day two, which I'll post next, was spent weaving on a peg loom.

 Under the tarpaulin, the dye baths get heated up using gas canisters and large, portable burners.

 A sampling of the books Jane keeps on hand about plant dyeing. I've already placed my Amazon order.

 Beatrice and I picked a lot of coreopsis flowers!

 The humble marigold makes a lovely yellow dye.

 Damsons aren't just for jam. This bath gave the wool a very subtle pinkish-purple.

Madder root gives a vast array of reds, depending on the mordant agent used to pretreat the wool.

 We made a lot of yellows!

 Jane unrolls a huge fleece and shows us how to inspect one before buying.

 The takeaway: "Be very choosy about your fleece."

 The indigo bath. Once we got this going, we used it to dip some yellows to make green. Weirdly, you can't get a really good green dye from any single plant!

 Jane squeezing out the woad leaves to prepare the bath. This bath yielded both pale blue and pale green.

 Some of the post-indigo dipped greens.

Some nice carded wool, ready for spinning.

Jane demonstrates drop spindle spinning, something you're never, ever likely to see me do.