This personal challenge to guild members is taken from a recent challenge held by the Victorian Guild Thursday Dye Group.
We would like to adopt this idea as a challenge for our natural dyers in May before Autumn finishes, and a lot of our plant material dies down.
What you need to do:
select enough leaves, flowers or pruning’s from your gardens to dye a couple of skeins of yarn or reasonable sized pieces of fabric
try some things like rhubarb, peach or apple tree leaves, buddlia leaves or flowers, ivy, things from the veggie garden like onion skins, cabbage leaves, parsley, carrot tops, acorns
take a photo of what plant material you choose to use before dyeing
write down what kind of mordanting and method of dyeing you are using. This might include immersion, eco dyeing or solar dyeing, etc.
take photos of your finished yarn or fabric and email us your before and after photos (in small size) with a brief description of what you did
remember that you will get more dye colour if you use a weight ratio of at least 1:1 of dye material to fibre. You can also try after mordants or modifiers to change or increase the range of colours that you get
Send in your contributions by the end of May. Photos and your dye story will be posted here and on Instagram. Use the hashtags #hwsdgtas or #hwsdg_tas on instagram.