You can grow natural dyes for wool in your back yard garden. As farm folks at heart, it's natural for us to prefer do it yourself projects. The winter often finds us leafing through seed catalogs, planning our gardens for spring and summer. If you also love wool, consider adding some seeds for dye plants to this year's garden plots. While this article will concentrate on how to choose plants that grow natural dyes for wool, quick searches will yield more information regarding dyes for other … [Read more...]
Harvesting Natural Dye Plants
Fall is the perfect time to harvest natural dye plants and store for later use. While not all dye plants store well after being cut or gathered, quite a few will yield color just as well later, as they will fresh. You may have grown some of the plants on this list in your natural dye flower garden. If the plant contains the dye in it's roots, fall is the time for harvesting. Each dye plant has it's own specific way to harvest natural dye. When the plant, flower or nut are also food for the … [Read more...]
Dyeing Wool with Natural Plant Dyes
Learning to Use Nature for Dyeing Wool After years of producing yarn from our home grown wool, I reviewed A Garden to Dye For by Chris McLaughlin and I was thrilled to dive into the world of naturally dyeing wool. ( Click on this link if you want to read my review on Amazon.) We raise our own fiber animals on the farm and send the raw fleeces to a local mill to be processed and spun into yarn. A goal of mine has been to start dyeing wool and yarns to add to our shop. I … [Read more...]
