Dyed, Naturally

See those pretty colors?  Can you believe that they all came from natural dyes?  What you see are the sample rovings that resulted from the first day of the Sheep Shed Fiber retreat with Carol Lee that I attended recently (and blogged about in my last post).  Now that I’m back home, one of my goals is to spin these natural colors up and use them together in a project.  So far I’ve completed:

Cochineal with alum mordant (cochineal is from little red bugs that grow on cactus — and if you think that’s icky, remember that silk comes out of a worm’s backside … eeewww!).

 Black oak bark with a copper mordant

 And these two skeins, which are dyed with logwood.  The darker bluer one is with an iron mordant.  The purpley one is with alum.

I’ve barely scratched the surface with natural dyes… not sure whether to plunge in and get wrapped up in another fibery-obsession or not!  There’s always something new to learn!   As I try to restrain myself and at least spin up what I’ve already got, I couldn’t resist signing up for another one-day Natural Dye workshop.  It can’t hurt to see how another person does it, right?  So assuming I get a space, next month I’ll spend a Saturday doing natural dyes with Priscilla Blosser-Rainey at her farm in Virginia, to complement my day with Carol Lee at her Wyoming homestead!