Here it is, my stash of plant dyed yarns, each one starting out as approximately 1 ounce of Lamb's Pride Worsted, in either White Frost or Creme, premordanted with alum.
I first heard of dyeing with plants in January 1989 in my sophomore year at college when my roommate and I signed up for an Interim term course in Batik. That's one class for one month, all day, five days a week. I was a business student and had no clue what I was getting into but wanted to try something different. Despite the cold and nasty weather, we did the dyeing outside with dust masks and rubber gloves for safety reasons because we were using Procion chemical dyes.
Looking for inspiration, I browsed the school's library for design and dyeing books, one day coming across the book Nature's Colors; Dyes from Plants, by Ida Grae, and was immediately fascinated. The book was out of print at the time so I copied every single page on the library copiers, punched holes, and bound it with metal rings. It wasn't long after that that I asked my mom again to teach me "please, just one last time" how to knit. (I think I used some awful dusty pinkish Red Heart and never finished the sweater I started, throwing it away at the end of the school year.)
Two summers later, driving to work, I had one of those lightning moments when I suddenly recognized that the plant growing alongside the train tracks that I'd been driving by every day on the way to work was one I had seen in that book. I double checked and confirmed that it was Queen Anne's Lace. Soon, I took the next steps of collecting the dyepots, measuring and stirring utensils, yarn, mordant, and dyeplant material that I needed to get started. The first time I saw that newly dyed bright yellow yarn come out of the dyepot I knew that I was hooked.
All that summer, I was taking a closer look at the plants that I saw around me, often just weeds in the ditches, learning to identify them through books, both field guides and dyeing books, that I found a various libraries, second hand book stores, and at Weaving Works in Seattle.
Most dyeing books recommend keeping good records: samples of what you dyed along with information about where and when you collected your dyestuffs and how you did the actual dyeing, and so I started to do the same. One of the reasons for doing so is so that you can attempt to repeat what you've done in the past or so that you can learn what to do to achieve different results.
As I moved around the country, I took my dyeing equipment with me, learning about and trying the plants I found around me. This activity has been a constant, on and off, throughout the past 14 or so years of my life. My interest in it comes and goes, but in the summertime I tend to drift back into it as the plants growing all around inspire me again.
That simple act, years ago, of pulling a particular book off the shelf sent me on a path I never could have foreseen. I can attribute that moment as leading to so many different parts of my life: knitting, taking a lichen dyeing class, an interest in plants and gardening, working at a nursery, working at a health food store, teaching a natural dye class, Kool Aid dyeing, this blog?, these pictures?, this post? what else?
I was fooling myself if I ever thought that, by record keeping, I'd try to recreate a color I had once gotten before. Rarely have I dyed with the same plant twice. There are just so many plants to try out there that there usually seems no reason to repeat the same one again. What I enjoy most, looking over my dyeing recordbook, is reading what I wrote, remembering where I was at that particular time in my life when I collected the dyeplant, what I was doing, what I was feeling, how warm or cold the weather was, what the leaves or flowers looked like and felt like in my hands. The colors of the yarn themselves are lovely of course, but rather secondary. It's very much like that walk-down-memory-lane feeling of looking through a photo album, but much more personal and unique to who I am and who I've been.
Do you think that I found what I was looking for that day at the library?
