Gloucestershire Guild Dyeing Group

摘要

In addition to our monthly Guild meeting, Gloucestershire Guild has two very successful spinning and weaving groups which meet on two Wednesdays each month. In June we decided to introduce a dyeing group; again this proved to be very popular and at the first two meetings we were finding our feet with All-in-One acid dyes, experimenting with colour mixing and resist dyeing. In September we decided to push ourselves even further and try natural dyeing. We turned to our Guild member Sue Day, who achieved a Distinction in her Certificate of Achievement in Natural Dyeing last year. Earlier in the year we had started a dye garden at Dundry Nurseries (where we hold our meetings) and were lucky enough to have dahlia plants donated to us by the nursery to start us off. These were now in full bloom, so we were all set. We harvested the flowers and sorted them into yellows, reds and oranges, and whilst these were simmering away to extract the colour, Sue explained to us the importance and the different methods of mordanting our yarns, which we had already done at home. We let the yarns simmer gently for about an hour in the three different dyebaths, and the resulting colours were absolutely amazing. However, this was just the start: we then modified our colours by dipping them into prepared pots of citric acid, copper sulphate, iron and ammonia for about 10 minutes, and we were amazed at the array of colours that resulted. We were all so grateful to Sue for all the work she had put into preparing for the day. Sue is a supplier of natural dyes, mordants, equipment and yarns, and I am sure we will be putting in our orders so that we can carry on at home.