Natural Dyeing | Wonderful Woad and Rainbows course with Fay Jones

Woad doesn’t just stand out as a dye plant because it was the only blue producing plant available to most of Europe for hundreds of years but also in the method of its extraction and application to fibres through the vat method.

In this workshop we will start with leaves and end up with a range of vibrant blues using the ‘hydrosulphide vat’ method.

In the afternoon we’ll add some of our blue yarn to a yellow dye bath to make a range of bold and colour fast greens and some madder root (red) to get purples.

Dyeing additional skeins in just red and yellow you’ll be able to dye nearly a whole rainbow in one day!

We’ll be using fresh woad, grown by the tutor near her workshop in Suffolk and a foraged yellow over dye on 2 full size wool skeins with smaller wool and vegetable fibre skeins for the other colours so we can see the wide range of what woad is capable of.