Dyeing Yarn Naturally looks at how to colour vegan yarn, with plant-based dyes. Packed with tips and photos, learn about pH and metal modifies to achieve a wide range of colours, then find recipes for 25 dye plants, and tips to forage/source dyes from plants. It also covers processes to make blue shades like indigo and woad.
Despite the image of kittens playing with balls of wool, it’s a choking/tangling hazard, so keep it secured away, for the safety of feline friends. If growing or foraging for plants, learn how to avoid toxic plants like indigo, near pets.
Natural Kitchen Dyes shows how to use vegetable peels to create blush pinks and peach, fruit skins to make lemon yellows, a green dye sourced from carrot tops, dried spices and used tea bags to create vibrant yellows, rich terracottas and deep browns.
You can then use waste that would be composted or recycled (like old clothes) and turn them into colourful bags and patchwork floor cushions, or dried pulses past their sell-by date, to make a beaded necklace. Stoney Creek Colors offers plant-based dyes.
My Indigo World is a children’s story of the colour blue. Not many natural plants are blue, which is why it’s more difficult to dye items this colour. The book includes the science behind making blue dye with an ‘indigo map’ of shades produced around the world, plus tips to make blue dye.
Wild Yarn is a beautiful book by a textile artist, who creates rich textured works from yarn that she spins and blends herself. In this book, she looks at how she does it. As well as covering plant fibres like hemp and soya, the book focuses on an interesting idea of creating wool from rescued sheep on the South Downs.
Just like ‘vegetarian wool’, this would create a wonderful alternative income for farmers who presently kill sheep to make lamb (or older sheep in the wool industry).
Sheep need to be sheared, so making this into a big industry could fuel the demand for wool (both for knitting and clothing) yet also help to keep sheep alive and well, while providing income for farmers.
Although sheep do need shearing to avoid over-heating, falling over (right one up if you see it upside down or it will die) and to see predators, the conventional wool industry has many issues.
