A neighbor lost her beloved Black Walnut tree to a demented arborist so we decided to put the leaves to work before they headed back into the earth. The results were beautiful!
On wool yarn tied with rubber bands:
On a cotton dish towel tied with marbles and rubber bands:
We walked over to another neighbors yard and volunteered to prune her purple-leafed plum tree. With those leaves in an old metal bucket heated on our rocket stove we got our biggest surprise. At first the dye was a gorgeous magenta and we thought we'd get a similar color.
Well, after simmering for a while we took a look at the dye bath to find it almost black. Cotton t-shirts became a lovely slate grey. Wool yarn we tied off with rubber bands to get a resist affect.
Here is the resulting color combination:
Tumeric (a little goes a long way), does a bang up job on everything. I did a dish towel wrapped with rubber bands and popsicle sticks (Shibori technique). Wow!
Here is a picture of the towel with some Calendula soap we made with color from the Tumeric dye too:
More to come. I'm teaching 5 weeks of classes for kids this Summer. NATURE CRAFTS, HERBS FOR KIDS, NATURAL DYES, COOKING FROM THE GARDEN, URBAN HOMESTEADING. I'll post the highlights as we go along.
