A Dyeing Day From Long Ago

Dye sample

A long time ago, in 2012, we had a dyeing day at the Cottage.  I had forgotten that I had these samples, but found them when I was doing a tidy up the other day.  This day happened before we had a website so I thought I would write about it to remind us all who were there what a fun day we had.  Jenny C ran the day for us, which is always fantastic because Jenny is so knowledgeable.  We split the fleece and weighed something like 50 or so, 50g lots and had a multitude of pots on the ground with fleece soaking in them.  We started by choosing our four base colours – a blue, a yellow, a green, and a red.  When the base dyes were completed we removed the fleece, and then divided the dyebaths so that we could dye some of each of the other colours to get twelve more colours.  You can see all the colours that we created in the picture above.  The colour combinations can be seen in the table below.

 

Blue base Blue Green Blue Red Blue Yellow
Yellow base Yellow Blue Yellow Green Yellow Red
Green base Green Yellow Green Red Green Blue
Red base Red Blue Red Yellow Red Green

It was a real joy seeing how each of the colours turned out. We were often surprised to see how some of the combinations turned out. I think we may have done a third lot too, for instance dyeing some yellow-red in the green base, which would give us 48 colours all together, which sounds about right. I wish I had more photos of the samples because we had such an amazing colour range.

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