Colour Palette of the Month - December!

I love colour and find it really hard to work with neutrals and monochromatic palettes.  It's strange then, that in this monochromatic snowy and frosty landscape I'm beginning to adjust!

Monday morning, this week, was really frosty in the Trent Valley and I couldn't help but take this photograph at 8.30 while out for our morning walk.

When I downloaded the image from my Blackberry I was really taken with the lovely rich browns, creams and apricots,  moving me to use it as my palette for December and as my Seasonal Greetings card.  It puts a new twist on winter colours!  It's certainly not winter white, is it?


Dyeing the lovely rich colours would be a challenge and I think I'd use cutch (Thar) or sappenwood (Garden) with iron water for the browns and cutch for the apricot shade, with oak gall for the cream.  What would you use?

Using Pure Tinctoria Dyes in Paper Making

Jane Deane, a very accomplished dyer, has emailed this image to me. It's a collage of an Ichthyosaur, that was included in the design work for a piece of art as a book in Traces at Walford Mill gallery, Wimborne, Dorset, but it has been "re-commissioned" in its own right for an exhibition in September, based on the Jurassic Coast and called Stone, Paper, Scissors.

She used Pure Tinctoria's cutch (Thar) to dye the paper pulp with a varigated effect. Here's how she did it:

For a varigated effect to the paper, just dissolved the dye in water as you would do normally and stirred it into the pulp.

For a more even colour, mix the dye colour in the water for the paper vat, before you add the pulp.

I think it's really beautiful!

Gift Idea No. 9!

This is a really simple idea, following on from the last post.

For spinners who've never tried natural dye extracts (or even dyeing!), why not buy them one of the substantive dyes that contain tannin. These are Amber-M (Oak Gall), Kango (Myrobalan), Pacific (Pomegranate) and Thar (Cutch). One 25g packet of any one of these dyes will dye 500g of fibres and shouldn't need any other mordant, such as alum and cream of tartar and so can be done in one step:

• Weight your fibres in their dry state
• Wet them out (if using tops curl them into a bundle and secure end round the bundle then immerse in warm water with a squirt of washing liquid
• Weigh up to 5g of dye extract for each 100g of wool yarn.
• Dissolve the dye in a small amount of water, heating if necessary to aid the dissolving or add a "grain" of washing soda.
• Top up the water so that it will be sufficient to cover your yarn when it's in the pot.
• Add your wetted out yarn to the pot.
• Slowly bring to a simmer over about 45 minutes.
• Simmer for 45 minutes.
• Cool in the pot then rinse thoroughly.

For as little as £1.30 for the dye and your fibrey friends own fibre what more could they want!

Hot News!

Hi all

I wanted to let you know some exciting news. Five of Pure Tinctoria's natural dye extracts gave been given their Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) which is really wonderful and the remaining dyes are due to get their GOTS in the next few months, so keep an eye out for that post, too.

The five dyes are Amazon (Annatto), Amber-M (Oak Gall), Indus (Madder), Kango (Myrobalan) and Thar (Cutch).

We have also been able to reduce the price of Amazon and Indus recently so please got to the Pure Tinctoria website for details.