Your Custom Text Here
I started playing with natural dyes and foraging for natural color five years ago, and one of my first and favorite dyes that I experimented with was with goldenrod. It’s a beautiful signal to me every year when I see it growing on the roadside that fall is coming and cozy, autumn feelings are on the way.
Check out the full post here! What’s your favorite natural foraged dye?
The next morning, we were to meet Helene at 9 to get out of the city, and so the majority of us came down for breakfast around 8 AM. I met all of the ladies who would be journeying together: Brenda from the Netherlands, Pennie and Phillippa from the UK, Kris from Denmark, and Brigitte from France. I unknowingly outed myself as an American right away by eating an apple with peanut butter for breakfast (apparently a very American thing to do) and visited with everyone a little bit before collecting our things to load up!
Helene arrived in the most beautiful green cardigan and lacy shawl, exclaiming that she dressed for spring but couldn’t believe how hot it was (this was a theme of the week, apparently temperatures in the 50s in May were QUITE unusual for Iceland. We saw a few lupines on our drive that day and she was so surprised, she couldn’t believe it.) Our small crew loaded on a small tourist bus and began the drive towards Highway 1, which loops all the way around the country. As we drove, Helene told us all about the geologic history and answered a bunch of our questions about the history, culture, and agriculture of the country. A vast majority of the food that is eaten in the country is imported due to the harsh climate, but I was amazed at all that she shared about the ingenious ways that farmers have learned to cope with rocky soils, long winters, and an incredibly short growing season.
We were all, I think, taken aback by the views already. Whenever someone has asked me how I found Iceland since this trip, I always think of this moment on the first day when we drove out of Reykjavik. The plains, flat and grassy with almost no trees, giving away in a moment to towering, dark mountains whose peaks were completely obscured by the clouds. It made me think of God, and for a while I sat there in wonder at it all.
Of course, we were only just beginning. We stopped for our lunches, to be taken on the road, at a small cafe on the edge of Borgarnes and after travelling through the longest tunnel I think I have ever seen, which cuts across an enormous body of water and makes the journey just 45 minutes instead of 2.5 hours between the cities. The first day was a touring day, and we had a lot to see!
Our first stop after Borgarnes was to a farm owned by a lovely craftswoman named Rita, who had farmed all her life and spoke mostly Icelandic. She and her family raised sheep for many years and now focus mainly on dyeing and sheep-related crafts, including the making of buttons, needles, jewelry and tools out of Icelandic sheep horns. She had worked to source naturally-colored Icelandic fleeces beyond the traditional and easy-to-dye white in shades of fawn, chocolate, and even black. The purchases began. :) She also treated us to small glasses of bilberry juice, or wild blueberry juice, intensely sweet and delicious, while we spent some time on her homestead.
From Rita’s farm, we visited the country store and Wool Collective in the Borgarfjörður region. Composed entirely of individual artisans, makers, farmers, and dyers who directly benefit from the sales of their handcrafted wool goods, it was incredible, and a privilege to support. In an era of increasingly industrialized and outsourced souvenirs, I was very excited for the opportunity to directly support the people and crafts that made this country so special. A few naturally-dyed mini skeins made it into my shopping basket, each individually labeled with the person who dyed the wool, and the materials with which it was dyed. The region also boasts its own lopapeysa sweater completely original and representative of its culture which could only be purchased at the store. I love those little ducks!
After we had seen everything, and with promises of more treasures ahead, we drove to the home and studio of Gudrun Bjarnadóttir. Gudrun provided us with an in-depth history and look at her natural dye process to make her Hespa yarn. (This is a wonderful interview that Tolt Yarn & Wool did with Gudrun a few years ago.) A botany professor by trade, Gudrun began naturally dyeing Icelandic wool using traditional methods that combined all of her interests and passions. She taught us all about how she learned how to adapt traditional methods for a modern kitchen (subbing ammonia for sheep’s urine, for example) and her love of the craft. In her pots that day were yarns being dyed with Icelandic moss (actually a lichen), lupine leaves, rhubarb root and some non-native species that have a long history in Iceland including madder, indigo and cochineal.
Gudrun was so patient and attentive to our questions, and you could tell she has a real passion and a love for Iceland, its history, and her craft. She joined us for our bakery lunch of sandwiches with ham and hardboiled eggs (a new cuisine for me, but not for my European counterparts), fried “love balls” (donuts with raisins and cardamom) and an iced Danish. Her studio door opened up to more mountain views, chickens walking around contentedly, and a cool breeze. I could have stayed there forever. It was so special for me to see how deeply rooted natural dyeing is to the culture and history of Iceland and made my own experiences with natural dyes in my kitchen at home seem much more connected to a larger history and culture of extracting beauty from nature for our day-to-day lives.
In Iceland, one of the best and craziest things I figured out while traveling is how you can be on your way to some destination, and just so happen to be in the same vicinity as a waterfall fed by a northern glacier that was originally carved in its place by lava flows. (Is this real life?) So was the case with Husafell. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Our final stop for the day (as if the day had not already been one of the most incredible of my life) was at the Háafell goat farm. Goats, we would come to learn, have been largely persecuted and under-resourced in a country obsessed with sheep, almost to the point of Johanna. 16 years ago, Johanna made it her mission to save these animals and thanks to her incredible determination, a well-timed Indiegogo campaign and Game of Thrones, the goats survive to this day. In fact, a new baby goat had just been born a few hours before our arrival.
Just outside our lodging for the next few days, an incredible crater that we climbed to the top and where we squished our hands in the most lush moss you’ve ever seen.
Much earned at the end of our day, a beautiful meal in a restaurant where the sun never set and where we remarked on our exhilarating and exhausting day. The next day we would stay in our country hotel for the first day of our workshops!
I want to start out this post by saying that this might be one of my favorite yarns I've ever made, and the pictures truly do not do it justice. A couple of weeks ago I started experimenting with solar dyes. I wanted to keep my fiber soft, and removing heat from the equation seemed like a good way to achieve that. Once again, I was surprised and delighted. Natural dyes are the best!
This particular batch of dyes were made with local blackberries interspersed with the Rambouillet wool in a jar for about 3 days. The water turned this crazy, vibrant purple, but the fiber itself turned pale lavender, with pops of grey and bright purple and even a bit of pink. So wild! I love the patterning in this wool, the areas where the blackberries rested created this beautiful painterly effect in what would have taken many colors to dye chemically. After the fiber had time to dry, I spun it and plied it with a heathered grey eco wool blend. The subtle shifting shades of the blackberry dyed yarn pop out so beautifully against it, and I couldn't be more happy with how it turned out.
The resulting yarn is drapey and smooth, you'd guess that it was a wool/silk blend, and not the 100% wool that it is! I'm so tempted to keep this skein for myself, but instead I'll hopefully have it listed in the shop sometime tomorrow.
More solar dyeing is definitely in my future, and gives me a hope for spring during the freezing rain that is hitting North Carolina right now; the last bitter storms of winter that we'll likely see as March quickly approaches.
I think I may be falling hard for natural dyes. When I go to the grocery store, the farmer's market, I think about my menu for the week, and think about the natural dye properties of everything I'll consume that week. My freezer right now is half food, half dye materials (avocado, pomegranate and mushrooms, if you want to know). And on Friday as Brandon and I were in search of a piece of clothing for his Halloween costume, I found myself perusing the tops, looking for cotton or linen or wool that would be suitable to dye.
I was successful, and brought home a 100% cotton tunic for my next project. Saturday I woke up and mordanted the tunic, an organic cotton dishtowel, and a small linen project bag for a few hours, and then brewed up a vat of black tea. In they went! I've noticed that though the process of taking the dye takes at least an hour, I can tell pretty quickly whether or not the color is going to really take in the materials I've put in the dyepot. Still, the anticipation is so fun as I come back every few minutes to poke the items around and watch the progress.
After an hour, I took the materials out, let them drip out a bit, and then washed them in my washing machine on cold with a tablespoon of dish soap. And then out on the clothesline!
It's a bit hard to tell from the picture, but the organic cotton dishtowel took the color the best, followed by the project bag and then the tunic, which dried into a soft tan color. And although the tunic and towel were both labeled "100%" cotton, the threads used clearly weren't, and stayed pure white, which was something I didn't even consider. Lesson learned!
Though time-intensive, I loved this day because it embodied what slow fashion means to me in our life right now. Reducing waste by buying second-hand, seeing beauty in an old, stained garment at a store and naturally, organically turning it into something beautiful and functional. I know that my "tea-shirt" is something that I will value and love and wear to threads. And then mend, and keep on wearing. :)
Slow Fashion October is officially over for this year, but I know I'll carry the principles I've been reminded of and the stories and perspectives of everyone who participated with me into this coming year, and for that I'm grateful. If you need something to read during your lunch hour, I encourage you to go check out Karen's round-ups of some of the best of Slow Fashion October on her blog. They're so inspiring!
The past few months I have really been loving our local library. Not only is it beautiful, with whole walls full of windows and perfectly positioned armchairs and self-check out, it is full of the most amazing knitting/weaving/crochet/craft books you could think of. It has been a source of much inspiration, especially following my somewhat failed dyeing experiment.
One of my favorite books that I have read is Harvesting Color by Rebecca Burgess. I love it because it not only has simple-to-execute recipes and gorgeous pictures, but it gives great references and maps of where to go to harvest the materials included in the book. A lot of them were based out of California and the west, where the author lives, but quite a few were spread over the east coast up to Vermont and down through Florida. Success!
In late September around here driving through country roads I kept seeing fields and fields of goldenrod. They showed up for about two weeks, and last weekend when we got buckets of rain across the state thanks to Joaquin, they just as quickly made their exit. Luckily, in that window I had some free time to go and cut a large pile of these lovely fronds from the farm, and that evening, we dyed!
The night before I dyed, I soaked these two sad non-mushroom skeins in water and mordanted in alum. I boiled the goldenrod for about an hour in my dye pot, extracted all of the plant material, re-wet the yarn in warm water and let the yarn sit in the dye pot for another hour at around 180 degrees. It was raining that night, so when I took it out of the pot I just let it sit on my porch for an hour to rinse. :)
I could tell within 10 minutes of the yarn sitting in the dye that it was going to take, which was so exciting. And in addition to the most vibrant yellow it has lovely undertones of green as well.
I have a few powdered natural dyes that I've purchased, but the thought of going out into the neighborhood that I live and work in, collecting these natural materials and extracting their beauty for yarn was such a cool feeling. I see many more experiments in my future.
Last week I had an unexpected opportunity from a farm nearby, and I came to be the owner of some aged shitake mushrooms. They were past the point that they could be eaten, which would have definitely been my first choice (mushrooms forever), so I thought I'd finallytry my hand at some natural dyeing. Home they came and in the dye pot they went.
I didn't use a mordant, but did soak the yarn (Moeke yarns Elena) in hot water before dropping in the dye pot. I boiled the mushrooms for about an hour and the water turned this really lovely mahogany color that the photographs didn't quite capture. I was so excited! I put the yarn in the pot at about 170 degrees for around 45 minutes, swirling occasionally, and then let the yarn sit in the pot overnight with the heat off and the lid on.
My results were less than stellar, to be sure. The yarn basically didn't change color from its original shade, which was crazy with the water color being such a deep brown. It seemed like it had gone down a shade or so towards brown, but it turned out that was just the color change from the wool being wet. Ha!
The next day I went to my public library and picked out about 6 books on natural dyeing, so I think my future attempts will go much better. This was just a shot-in-the-dark, I-randomly-decided-to-do-this sort of activity (and I have frozen some additional mushrooms to try again later), so I'm not too disappointed. Sometimes it's just fun to try new things and see where it will take you.