Made from scrap

Made from scrap
All's well

Followers

Total Pageviews

Saturday 11 June 2011

Dyers Picnic - Birmingham and District Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers


What a fantastic day we were very busy and productive.   I had a lot of fun learning a great deal about dyeing and we had a delicious 'Picnic Lunch'.  Dyeing was great fun as a group, as we got to try out several types of dye and dyeing techniques comparing notes and results as we went along..  The member who hosted it did a brilliant job providing the venue (her back garden), setting up the marquee and the camp stoves, organising several dye baths and helping all of us.  The Marquee was perfect to gather under when the sun stop shining and we had a couple of showers of rain.
A 'Weld' Dye bath
We also had Dye baths of Forsythia and Copper, Logwood, Walnut, Onion skin, Madder, Indigo and cochineal.  Acid dyes were also available for people to experiment with.
Acid Dyeing in progress.
Some beautiful Norwegian Fleece Getting the Colourful Experiment treatment
The prettiest washing line for miles around
All of the above colours were produced with Natural Dyes apart from the 'Canary' yellow which is an acid dye.  They are all reasonably Colourfast Dyes.  I loved the pinks and purples.  My favourite is the purple produced by the Logwood.   

10 comments:

  1. That looks fun! I am determined to give dyeing my own yarn a go. Glad you had fun.
    Love Tickety-boo x

    ReplyDelete
  2. That looks like a great time! You inspire me to get going on my spinning again. I have some wool all set to spin, but it's pre-dyed is rainbow colors.. fun!
    ((hugs)), Teresa :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tickety Boo, It is great fun, like mixing magic potions :)

    Teresa, I would love to see your spinning and then what you make with your yarn :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. The long skeins of pink and purple look fab together. Hard to believe some of the colours you can get naturally!

    Glad you had a great time and that the sunshine was semi-cooperative :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. What a wonderful way to spend a day x

    ReplyDelete
  6. love this! wish you were in birmingham alabama, where i live, so i could have joined y'all!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Linda - it was great to be busy with like minded people and there was something to be said for the quintessentially English weather it somehow added to the fun, sun hats, jumpers, sun hats coats, sun hats, woolly hats!

    Joyce - do you get much rain in 'your' Birmingham? If it is on next year I will let you know in advance you can pop over. :)

    Hannonle - It is amazing those colours can be achieved naturally isn't it. Onion skin makes a nice bright yellow. What fascinates me is who worked all this out? You literally need a 'recipe'. So much to learn so little time.... :)

    ReplyDelete
  8. Cool colours. Dyeing is super fun, I would love to try dyeing with natural dyes and one day soon I will try onion skins. Lovely pictures, the colours really do sing:-)

    ReplyDelete
  9. This looks like my type of picnic! You all created some beautiful hanks of yarn! It amazing to see what colors can be found naturally occurring! I hope you knit up something fantastic and share your FO with us!

    ReplyDelete
  10. just a quick one from me to say that I love love love all your colours especially the logwood, its gorgeous :)

    ReplyDelete

I appreciate and enjoy reading all of the feedback from your comments. Thank you for taking the time to stop by and sharing your thoughts. Sadly I have found it necessary to enable word verification, something I was trying to avoid...but I am receiving an unmanageable deluge of Spam! We don't want that do we? xxx :)