Perceptions of Organic Dyeing

The terms 'organically dyed' and 'dyed organically': what does this mean to you? Natural dyes or synthetic, or simply processed to organic standards?  Does it matter?


We use 'natural' dyes for the yarns we use for making our knitwear; our process is certified by the Soil Association to Global Organic Textile Standards (GOTS). GOTS also allow dyeing using low impact synthetic dyes. This is necessary - it is economically and practically impossible, and probably unsustainable, to use natural dyes for everything. 


But - very often, customers are taken aback when we talk to them about what we do and our colours, and learn that most organic textiles use synthetic dyes. There seems to be an assumption that organic wool, particularly, is coloured with plant dyes, and often disappointment on finding this may not be the case. 


Of course, in the world of the chemist, the term organic is a little different to consumer understanding, too. 


We describe our wool as 'dyed to organic textile standards'. 

Old and new: life in the garden

This time of year is always so exciting; seeing the world come back to life!
I wander around my little garden, musing over developments with my morning cup of tea. I love the anticipation; looking for much loved plants beginning to emerge after their sleepy winter, and equally the surprise of seeing something for the first time, especially having completely forgotten that I had planted it in the first place!
I had picked up this simple little primrose for 50p from the charity stall in the market last autumn, having no idea of the colour at all...!


My garden is now three years old, and I feel an enormous satisfaction seeing autumn plans come to life over the course of the following year.
However, one of my favourite happenings in the garden at the moment is a quite serendipitous combination of the bright new pulmonaria flowers and spotted leaves seen through the burnt, rusty coloured sedum heads, left from last year.


We are always inclined at the start of the new year in January to sign off on the last and start a fresh. And yet here in my garden is a beautiful demonstration of how the remnants of past seasons go on to inform the developing masterpiece; nothing is ever really over, or ever really forgotten.
As I sit and ponder this with my morning tea I feel happily comforted. Life is a collection of experiences, one informing the next, and still the most beautiful moments are always the ones that happen by accident.

Colours with Madder

A year ago now I did some experimenting with Madder, and so it's about time I posted something about it! I was interested to see what effect different water qualities would have. Whenever we are at a show, we get comments about the lovely bright reds we get - commonly people seem to get 'tomato soup orange'. My dyeing 'bibles' are three old books: and one thing shines through in these - water quality. The old dye-houses were in areas where water produced the best results. Madder does best in hard water, but Talgarth is in a valley of old red sandstone (not that I'm a geologist or anything - that's what is always mentioned when local agents are selling a farm....).

Using Madder extract at 10% weight of goods, I dyed samples on various shades of Shetland wool, using water from three sources, using observations around the water source as a guide to the sort of quality to expect:

1. Our spring at Pontithel, just along the road from Talgarth. This used to feed a pond for the Victorian lime kilns and charcoal ovens, now demolished to foundations, and for years was left to run through a pipe in the wall from where it drained through the ground and down to a stream. The end of the pipe had a great limey crust, so I wondered if this meant the water would produce even better reds.

2. The water running from an underground pipe at our mill near  Newquay, Ceredigion. The deposits accumulating around this pipe are very rust coloured, and the soil is on the acid side of neutral. The stone in the buildings often has rust-red colouring, and wherever water runs (and being an old water-mill there's quite a lot!) it leaves orange stains.

3. Tap water from Talgarth. This is what we usually use, and what I would use for a 'cold' dyeing and dyeing at different temperatures.

The wool was all mordanted with Alum at 8% and Cream of Tartar at 7% (Cream of Tartar can also affect Madder, some people prefer not to use it)

Pontithel: the slightly darker/duller sets have had iron added towards the end of dyeing. the photo doesn't do the colour justice - the reds are very full and a beautiful colour. This means that I am going to have to have large conatiners to fill from the spring every time I want to dye with Madder...

Felin: You can see the difference though, especially in the lighter red in this set of samples (below). Adding iron made the wool a little harsh - probably because of iron already present in the water. On fawn and grey yarns, the Madder produced some lovely terracottas. So - now there's 24 shades!

 Different temperatures also affect Madder. The best reds are gained by controlling the temperature at 60%. For this set, I used a precision temperature controller and dyed each of the yarn samples at the temperature indicated for 45 minutes, adding iron as before to get the darker colours. Another 6 shades!

 Finally, how much colour can you get just by soaking at room temperature? This last set were left at intervals as on the cards. The dye pot was stirred up daily and left in the dark. I wound some of the yarn afterwards onto a second set of cards and left them in the west facing window. I was pleasantly surprised to find little difference in intensity of colour after 2 months. I really must do some simple washing tests though as well.
This test was interesting - Madder takes time and patience to get a really good colour, lots of attention and slow raisin of temperature. Leaving it cold to it's own devices gave an even colour and left me time to do other things!

My old books have several other recipes and notes for madder, so I'm not quite done yet.....

Autumn Knits

Oliver agreed to do some modeling for us - makes a real change to have a male model!

Here's our Pwll y Wrach pullover - in English this means 'Witch's Pool'. The water tumbles down from the Black Mountains above Talgarth, falling into a pool at the top of the woods before rushing on down through the trees in the valley. The whole of the wooded valley is a nature reserve - home to dormice, rare plants and much beauty.

As the sun shines through it creates splashes of brightness and dappled shade, reflected in the colour sequences in the patterning on the front of this pullover. The greens and yellowy golds come from weld, coreopsis, oak, and goldenrod.

Late Summer Colour

After all the wind and rain it's lovely to have August ending on a high. The sun was warm yesterday and the wind had droppped, bringing out a mass of butterflies into the garden to enjoy the last flowers on the Buddleias.

We have four varieties - Lochinch, Empire Blue, Royal Red and Pink Delight. I love the warm scent of them, filling the garden on a still afternoon and the flowers follow on perfectly from the June roses. And of course, they are a magnet for butterflies, bees and hoverflies.

As someone who works with colour, I have to say the marmalade shades of the butterflies are rather prettier on the bluer flowers!

There is a purple fennel self seeded amongst Lochinch and it's lacy acid yellow flowers look lovely with the pale lavender blue. And those huge berries on Arum italicum Pictum light up the black leaves of Viola Labradorica.

Knitting in Colour

I've always loved knitting Fairisle type patterns. There's much debate over the name - probably better to describe it as stranded 2 colour knitting. The label 'Fairisle' should really only be used by Fairisle knitters, but it has come to be used as a generic term for this technique. There are many cultures around the world with traditional patterns knitted by stranding 2 colours in a row, and what we recognise as traditional Fairisle is just one.

Following my principle of using mostly undyed yarns, I've been working on some colour schemes for pullovers. In choosing the colours from our natural dyes, I aim to use those ones together that will still be defined after the colour has mellowed. This presents a challenge, as often the ideal combinations may not work in this way, and so compromises have to be made. But by using the undyed shades as a base for dying, the range is not as restricted as you may think. It just takes time to get it right when one has to go back to the dye pots!



The photo at top should, of course, be horizontal - just got to figure out why it insists on being vertical......the colours here are natural grey and brown with cochineal purple, cochineal and brazilwood pink, with a bit of oak and coreopsis for greeny colours.

The one below, faded hydrangeas, has white with oak, light cochineal on brown wool, and coreopsis for the gold.

Not the Blues

I'm sometimes asked if I have any blue wool - not often, people don't seem to notice, or they don't say. A friend of mine breeds Wensleydale sheep and I dye the yarn for her; she is a 'blue' person so I set up an indigo vat to explain. The photo below is the surface of the fermentation vat, which I think is so pretty - much prettier than the blue wool!

Anyway, by using indigo (or woad) you get a completely different set of colours to the other mordant dyes. And they just don't go together - well, I don't think so, and my friend agreed. Overdye using indigo on weld for greens for example, and you get emeralds and spring grass colours - quite bright - instead of olives and bronzy greens. So she is going to have to learn to do her own blues! And as I am not a 'blue' person, it was easy to make a decision not to include the blues. Some of the greys you can obtain have a bue-ish tint, especially when next to certain other colours.

All the other colours seem to reflect the environment we live in - obvious really I suppose!

Hay on Wye is twinned withTimbuktu and earlier this year some Mali - an leaders were in town and they were just so stunning in their Indigo robes and white headress with such dark skin - amazing!

That's where indigo belongs.