Jeff and I have been excited about planting a dye garden for the first time this year. First we got some seeds during our visit to The Thyme Gardens in the spring, which I wrote about in this post. Then our market friend Inge gave us some plant starts from her garden. We’ve enjoyed watching the plants grow and learning about them. Jeff looks the different plants up on the internet and reads to me about them.

We haven’t had much dyeing experience, other than using some black walnut powder to dye a shirt and some bags (the brown color turned out so pretty) and using alkanet root for dye in our tinted lip balm.

Here’s a tour of the dye garden right now:

.

 Shown above before flowering and then while flowering (which Jeff just noticed it doing this week.)

Isn’t it beautiful? Indigo makes a beautiful blue dye. There are different ways to dye with it, one is a fermentation process and then there are quicker ways as well. Jeff seems to have a connection to this plant, not to mention the color of the dye is one of his very favorite colors.

 ::Madder::

The part of madder used for dyeing is the root and it takes many years (I think three) before it’s ready. To me, something that requires that much patience will make the dye even more special when the time comes to use it. The color is red, like in this picture.

 ::Coreopsis::

 .

We’ve been harvesting the flowers, which is the part used for dyeing. We’ve read that it gives a bright yellow orange.

 ::Marigold::

.

We like having marigold flowers throughout the garden to repel things like nasty nematodes (that eat your roots.) Lo and behold they are great for dyeing too! I bought a gorgeous skein of yellow yarn last winter that our friend Inge dyed with marigolds from her garden. That bright yellow is one of my very favorite colors. Marigolds give yellows and greens. (The marigolds in the pictures were wet when I harvested them, which made them shine in the sunlight with glowing brilliance, almost looking surreal.)

 ::Dyer’s Chamomile::

.

We grew these a few years back, but never used them for anything (other than Jeff making me a beautiful bouquet or two.) This year we decided to grow them again, now that we’re interested in dyes. They are larger than regular chamomile. I love the pretty bursts of yellow in the garden. (Do you see the spider in the top picture?) I don’t know anything about the dyeing process with these, but look forward to learning more.

 ::Weld::

.

Our weld patch is growing wonderfully. Jeff looked weld up and it says it gives yellows. That sounds good to me.

 ::Woad::

.

What excites me about woad? The lovely lovely blue color it gives. It’s a light blue. You can see the color here on the hat of the needlefelted wizard I made.

.

I was really excited when I saw Ginny’s post about using dock seeds for dyeing yarn to create a honey brown color. (There are easy directions for how to do it here.) We had some dock going to seed in the yard and I told Jeff I wanted to harvest it. I hadn’t gotten around to it yet, then Jeff and Bracken surprised me by harvesting some for me. 

.
.

For natural-dyeing inspiration I love to look at:

 Brambleberry Yarns : with gorgeous naturally dyed yarns

Tinctoria Designs: with gorgeous naturally dyed clothing

I love the colors of natural dyes, they’re my very favorite colors. 

The book ‘Wild Color’ is on my wishlist.

Won’t it be fun to see how the colors turn out when we start experimenting with them?

.
.