Natural Dyeing workshop with Liesel Orend

Wow! What a great weekend! I went to a workshop by Liesel Orend at Montgomery College. I had always heard that you couldn't really get good colors with natural dyes and that the mordants were dangerous to handle. Boy did Liesel dispel those myths. The colors of her yarns are beautiful. And although there are some mordants that need special handling and disposal, we did all our dyeing using alum which is pretty innocuous. We did 3 sets of samples in seven colors, shifted one set with iron, then dipped the 3rd set in indigo. Plus we each got to dye 8oz of wool in whatever colors we chose. Mine were osage orange, cochineal, logwood, and indigo. I think everyone came away from the workshop “dying” to do more “dyeing”. You can see photos HERE. I haven't labeled them all yet, but you can see what we did. It was so much fun and I met a whole new group of interesting people. We're already talking about setting up more fiber days in 2008. A special thanks to Linda W for setting this up, and for letting me stay in her beautiful guest cottage so I wouldn't have to drive the 100 mi. round trip on Saturday night!


These are my finished skeins after washing.