I’ve spent the last three Mondays taking a natural dye class at Bluebird Dye Gardens with Laurie Hall. The class was specifically about shibori and we practiced various forms of it. It was wildly fun and I’d do the whole thing over in a heartbeat. We spent some time in her huge dye garden to get a feel for the work that goes into producing those marvelous dye plants. It also just gave us a moment to get our hands in the dirt. Laurie grows a wide variety of flowers and has a healthy madder bed.

If it isn’t obvious, I think it is definitely true that natural dyeing is far more complicated than the synthetic dyeing I do in my work. There are so many details with natural dyeing and things change with every plant and fiber being dyed. This post is full of pictures and I don’t even know all the names of the dye plants much less the details about the chemistry.