This sounds amazing.
It had never occurred to me that woad is a thing you grow (always assumed it was like ochre ie something you find in the ground[1]). A whole garden of dye plants is a new one on me.
For things like tansy and wormwood, is there any danger for small kids? I remember being told not to touch the foxgloves (?) at the of the garden because they were poisonous (?), but that may have been my mum just wanting some plants to survive a load of kids running around.
Also responding to
Buelligan, too, here.
Marigolds were always my go-to yellow plant, because you can freeze the flowerheads and dye with them in the middle of the winter -- great yellow dyes there. I also used to grow coreopsis and bee balm for yellow -- there's loads of yellow dye-plants -- goldenrod cut from the fields in autumn was another great source.
Yep -- I have indeed dyed a lot of fiber, mostly wool (cos cotton is a pain in the ass to prep) from plant dyes, both ones I've grow or gathered and more exotic stuff that I've bough like logwood and Brazilwood. This is the first time I've grown my own madder; in the past I bought the roots or bought cochineal.
I've dyed with woad plenty of times -- it's a noxious weed in some parts of the US (out West, mainly) and you have to report it when you see it. It chokes out pastures, I think. I have three woad plants now that are bolting -- they produce dye in year 1, but then bolt and make loads of seeds in year 2. It smells a lot like cabbage in the dyepot because it's part of that family of plants. Woad, like indigo, gets its blue from the indigen in the plants -- you can't boil the dye water like you do with other natural dyes because too much heat will destroy the indigen. Another interesting thing is that indigen does not bond with fiber the way other dyes do; it lays down molecules of itself like rooftiles on the fibre being dyed, and you can build up layers if you dye something repeatedly.
If you've ever bought a cheap blue shirt from a hippie shop and turned blue while wearing it, or your bluejeans made everything in the wash turn blue, it's because the fabric's been so overdyed that the hot water causes the dye to crock and run off it (and onto you or everything else in the wash). 'Crocking' is just the term for blue dye bleeding, dunno why.
I like dyeing with indigo but it's a real faff -- you can keep a dyepot of it going a long time; it's not unusual for indigo dyepots in India to be decades old, with names. Indigen is not water solutable, so you have to use stuff like urea (or sodium hydrosulphate, which was my poison of choice) to make it water soluble to bond with your fibre. To make this happen, the chemicals drive the oxygen out of the dyepot -- an indigo dyepot is actually clear yellow. The surface will look blue but that's only because you might agitate it a bit. What was fun was dyeing my wool with woad or indigo, carefully removing it -- so a white skein would look yellow, for example, and then re-oxygenating it -- ie swinging it around my head like a cowboy on crack -- the violent motion makes the fibre slowly turn a rich blue. Or if you're overdying a yellow or a red skein of yarn, it turns green or it turns purple. It was a showstopper when people were watching a fibre shows and stuff.
Anyway, indigo needs a really hot and humid and really long growing season -- the British tried to cultivate it in the American south, I think, as a way to avoid having to import dyes from India.
I dunno how it will look in the allotment this year, as I usually sourced my dyeplants at the big Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, but I've got a couple of good contacts online here in the UK.
Wormwood makes an ok yellow dye -- it would be toxic to eat, but not to touch, and it produced pretty little flowers. It tends to walk, so when you plant it, you'll get this amazing shrubby, silvery plant the first year, then the next, the middle's died back and it's sprouting up a foot away from where you planted it originally. I think by the time I escaped my ex my wormwood had travelled about 4 feet away from its original spot.
Tansy makes bright yellow dye, and produces little yellow, button like flowers. It has a strange scent, especially when you cut it. Some people react to it differently -- I knew I'd lose an afternoon when I went out to cut it for dyes, because the cycle was
1. cut the tansy and think, 'Huh! An odd, but not unpleasant little scent.'
2. start running around in circles laughing like a lunatic for about 10 minutes or so
3. fall over, feeling dizzy, then get a mild to pounding headache that put me in a sour mood the rest of the day.
So it does make you feel a but funny, but the extent of the very, very mild high depends on the person. I don't do any drugs or meds, for example, and the sugar in half a pack of Lovehearts has a similar effect on me, too.
You can have most dyeplants, Fenris, but I'd just teach the kiddies not to touch and explain why.
Keep in mind most dyeplants are a serious faff because it's not just chopping them up and putting them on to boil and adding the fibre -- in order to get the dyes firmly to bond with the fibre, you have to either prepare the fibre with a mordant solution. These are metallic salts ranging from the more or less benign alum, which is a pickling agent, to the spectacular potassium dichromate. I can't get the latter in the UK without going through the lab at the university - you could pick it up at spinning/weaving/wool shops in the US 20 years ago. It makes up a pretty orange liquid that looks exactly like an orangeade drink, except it will kill you due to organ failure if you ingest it, inhale it, or absorb it through the skin.) I also like using 'tin' or stannous chloride, although I can't remember if you add it first to water or add water to the powder. I
think the latter makes chlorine gas, which would be an exciting day out for the Cub Scouts, I guess.
Anyway, I'm planning a little dye garden -- apologies for the wall of text.
Remind me to tell you about the time the dog ate my $50 chunk of indigo pot stock. (indigo is sold in chunks and bricks, and it's hella expensive -- a little goes a long way, though).
