Dyefest 2008...the first

Since the 60's or 70's I have been interested in natural dye materials and the beautiful colours they produce on wool and silk. My experience until now has been with onion skins (of which I have plenty as I usually go through 35 to 50 pounds of onions in a winter). Over the summer friend Pia and I bought a box of more exotic dye materials I'd only previously read about, never worked with. Our treasure box included alkanet, cochineal, tumeric, indigo solution, cutch, and logwood, plus a quantity of mordant chemicals. We were like kids in a a very big candy store.

Pia and her husband Soren set up a terrific dye workshop in the bottom of the barn. We had two gas rings, one was a turkey deep fryer in a previous life and I think the other was perhaps a sauna heater. There were four dye pots of various sizes to work with, at least a dozen plastic buckets; water from a long hose meant we didn't have to haul water to the barn from elsewhere. Given the number of dye pots we ran over the course of the event, a count I place at 16 give or take a few and not counting soaking baths or mordanting baths. My count is based partly on the amount of yarn and fibre I brought home and partly on memory of the number of cochineal, logwood and alkanet baths we had trying to exhaust the dye. Pia still has several buckets of usable dye liquor to work with, but we were exhausted and had to end the festivities so we could get back to the rest of our responsiblities and lives. Oh, but it was so much fun!

I now have the house festooned with brightly coloured skeins and fibre, while I wait none too patiently for it all to dry. Today anything that is still damp can go outdoors to finish drying, and I suppose I should get the dyepots out of the car and into the garage for storage. Though really I hate the thought of putting them away. I have so many more ideas of things to try, but as I now don't have any skeins left to dye, I have my work cut out for me this winter to get a lot of spinning done for the May 09 dyefest. Then again I could 'cheat' and order in a quantity of undyed yarn?

Perhaps now that my initial excitement has been worked through I can actually plan projects to dye as Pia did. All I wanted this time was colour, any colour, because it was all so exhilarating.

I do have 8 x 113 gm skeins of worsted weight merino dyed in the brightest cochineal we got (a vest perhaps?); 6 x 50 gm skeins of mohair for a shawl in another version of cochineal that was more purpleish and one skein of Polwar

th sock yarn dyed a soft lavender from the alkanet bath. I also dunked my Polwarth shawl into the purpleish cochineal bath and it is a lovely colour now.

So, there I sat in the lawn chair I had the sense to bring, crunching up alkanet roots into small flakes.  Then I ground the cochineal bugs to a fine powder in a blender for two different approaches, the bright and the purpleish.  Both were soaked overnight in jars to bring out the most colour possible from this rather expensive material ($45 for 225 gms of bugs!). Our entire treasure box, clearly, was a fabulous gift at $50 split between us.

The learning curve for this neophyte natural dyer was big, very big. I don't think I could have had more fun and I'm sure I haven't since my dear friend Kate Waterhouse (1899-1995) introduced me to natural dyeing from local plants (on the prairies) in the early 70's. The sense of wonder and magic she shared has stayed with me. I remember coming into her house and poking my nose into pots simmering on the stove, never sure whether it was a dyepot or dinner! We read then about things like cochineal and indigo but these materials were completely out of reach to us and we could only dream over the pictures or descriptions we read. I know that Kate was with me in gleeful spirit during the dye

fest and I thought often of how much she would have loved this experience.
Pia and I, once we had a dyepot ready and filled with fibre or yarn, would take turns poking it with tongs just to glory in the colour and watch it take-up into the fibre. I think we spent the entire time with great big silly grins on our faces. I don't think fun and delight gets any

better than that. 

And here's the help...aren't they lovely?