I used to dye with plants, but I am to ill to source and dye with them now. I am mostly stuck in bed and very rarely get to go out in my wheelchair. So this walk felt incredible. Thank you for taking me (us) for a walk, it felt more amazing than I can describe. 😊
@@MijnWolden The happy noises I made reading this cannot be put into words.😁 PS I spun for 5-10 minutes today on my spinning wheel before I had to stop due to pain, but I am so happy!!! It was sooo long ago. I know it's maybe silly to be happy for such a short time, but baby steps, and I have learnt not to compare to others. I dont know why turning fluff into yarn makes my brain and hands happy but it doessssss! 🤩
Just wanted to say I love your energy and adore your videos❤ i have been binge watching your videos and a spindle is on it's way. You are very inspiring and a mood lifter☺️
i use to belong to the knitting/weaving guild here in town...one lady had lots of cards with holes in them and on a key chain. on each card was the bit of wool she dyed and with what wild plant she use to dye her wools with. it was a very interesting key chain filled with tons of information. i loved it so. i do love the navajo dye charts. they are quite interesting. thank u Jente. beautiful video.
Yay, more chaos! I’m just here to echo the other comments saying your energy is inspiring. I also started spinning because of your videos, something about the way you harness the chaos and use it to your advantage to make beautiful things made me want to do the same. All that to say thank you for sharing your love of spinning, local wool, and natural dyeing- back to binging your other videos!
You have such a similar climate. Here in the Pacific North West (of the US) I have all the flowers you do, including some I see in the background that you didn't mention. I just harvested a ton of dock and tansy and got beautiful yellow floof!
Some flowers were brought over from Europe, like dandelions, because the european immigrants thought they were such useful plants, wondering if tansy might be a same story...
@@MijnWolden definitely. I'm sure they escaped from gardens. There was also an American Acclimation Society in 1871 that brought and released many European plant and animal species to the US, including, sadly, starlings. I highly doubt that they were the only ones 'helping beautify' the country with their efforts, but it does mean I can now aggressively forage plenty of invasive species of plant guilt free!
I have a number of black walnut trees that have just recently started dropping their fruits in our driveway. There's so many that I should be able to freeze a lot of them and dye multiple times through the rest of the year. I'm excited to do my first natural dyeing on my own hand spun yarn!
My comment inspired a video?!? Hot damn! This is remarkably helpful, and now I need to look up foraging laws in my province! I do live by a little nature path, so I will have to see if I can go there with an app and do some investigating . . . once I figure out what the foraging laws are, of course. (I imagine they're pretty lenient, as I'm in Canada, but we'll see!)
I live in Finland and the foraging laws here are basically the closest you can get to "go hog wild". In the Nordic countries there's something called "every person's right", which means that you can forage berries (basically as many as you can, especially if they're not rare berries - there are so many bilberries in the forest it would be impossible for one person to pick so many that other people would miss out), mushrooms and plants from the forest and gather sticks basically anywhere. I'm not sure about digging stuff up, never tried that - but a lot of the plants I've foraged are considered weeds so I'll stand there on the road verge picking nettles and fat hen and I highly doubt anyone will ever look askance at me for doing so.
Fascinating stuff! There are a lot of dye plants here in the tropics where I live. The indigenous peoples have been using them for centuries to produce vibrant colours. They use ash from their campfires as a mordant, and they produce lovely rich browns, ochres, reds and pinks … 😊
Check for a list of invasive weeds for your area than check to see if any of them can be used as a dye source. Most officials will encourage you to take as much as you want of these plants they can keep these pants under control. Some plants from my area of north west Canada zone 2-3: Horsetail-Equisetum arvense, wild chamomile, woad, and dandelions.
I want to put even more emphasis on the warning on various Heracleum species (for example giant hogweed): They are phototoxic, meaning touching them will make your skin extremely sensitive towards UVA light and therefor sunlight, resulting in inflammation, swelling, nasty blisters etc. The reaction will start in the hours following the contact but can last for up to ten days. Seriously people, stay away from them 😅 Aside from that note, what a lovely video! Good point about focusing on local flora when trying to identify plants (or mushrooms, for that matter). Also loved how you kept saying Daucus carota. I'm following a D&D campaign on RU-vid where a side character is called Daucus - he's a harengon 😆 Had to smile everytime you said it 😊
Did you know that according to the Victorians, the Tansy had the meaning of "hostile thoughts" and can be seen as a declaration of war. ;) I found it so interesting, that such a small flower gives such a big message. Thank you for this video, it was a delight to see, listen en learn from.
In Australia we don’t have all those plants around easily but we do have eucalyptus so I suppose that is the trade, off. And if the other plants are visible they are all noxious weeds so we are encouraged to pull the whole lot out,as you said different countries different laws
About 30 years ago there was a woman who ran a small business based on eucalyptus-dyed wools. The colours were gorgeous. So there are definitely some possibilities there. I'd caution people to be careful about picking indigenous plants, I have a feeling the law does not look kindly upon them being uprooted, even for personal use.
@@MijnWolden oh in our case some person or people thought it would be really cool to plant those plants either in their yards or commercially, and they escaped. My "favourites" are prickly pear (they planted it to try and establish a cochineal industry), privet, pyrecantha and cottoneaster (hedging plants), Paterson's curse (poisonous but some guy thought it looked pretty) and Italian Arum (plagued my parents' yard, we ended up just mowing over it with the lawnmower because it's impossible to kill.) I'm sure some of these plants are kept in check by either local predators or snowfall but we don't really have those in Australia so..yayyyy.... Apparently there's nettles in Australia but I never saw any. Might depend on where you are - I'm from Canberra and it's probably too dry for nettles there. My first rude introduction to them was being in Hungary and walking into an innocuous mint-looking plant and then getting a nasty rash.
ohhhhhh for some reasons I kept thinking the acorns color were for oak galls xD I havent read that page right ..... currently eyeing all the oaks in my neighbrhood :D
Thank you so much for your videos! I tried my grandma's method (which is in a pot), but it looks like I forgot something important, because it didn't work. Then I tried your solar dyeing method and the colour is beautiful, rich and consistent. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much! 💖
I will have my own garden soon once my partner and i move, and i am so very exited to try foraging and doing some natural dying, and maybe growing some dye plants as well ❤
Came in just at the perfect time, recently been experimenting with mint,nettles and ivy. Mainly coming out various shades of yellow! Elderberries next!🤞
Love, Love, Love doing natural dye and experiment with the things in my yard all the time. I had not tried Queenannsalace yet but putting that one on my to do list. I hopped on Amazon and ordered that book before your video was over, always looking for more good dye books.
I'm Australian, and I find that for whatever reason we really lag behind in foraging information, especially when it comes to edible foraging. I'm sure this is a combination of factors, not least of which has to do with the fact that settler Australians ignored or dismissed Indigenous knowledge for *years*. As a result I don't really know what plants you can eat safely in Australia - even European plants like blackberries (because they are weeds and have inevitably been sprayed with pesticide.) There's a little tiny bit more accessible information on natural dyestuffs from Australian plants, but it's still pretty thin on the ground compared to European and American sources. I did dye successfully with Eucalyptus Cinerea - which funnily enough is often used in decorative flower arrangements at least in Finland, where I now live. It's a substantive dye and makes a beautiful burnt orange. I'm sure New Zealand has the same issue - I guess in Oceania most people are stuck with "fuck around and find out" because there just aren't the books or information available like there is for the other hemisphere. Anyway now I live in Finland and there's a lot more stuff I can edibly forage and also stuff I can dye with, but there's a potential other issue when it comes to accessing local knowledge. I'm pretty bad at Finnish! I don't know nothing but some very locally specific info is only available in Finnish, and if you look for foraging/dyeing info in English, it's probably most likely to come from Britain, which is further south and has a slightly different biome. I have a natural dye booklet from the mid-20th century in Finnish and there's a lot of stuff in there I could probably just awkwardly google translate/ask my wife about/muddle my way through - but another concern with older dyeing books is they can recommend that you use highly poisonous mordants. Probably best to stick to alum and iron if you're using an older dyeing guide.
I am going to try this eventually, thanks to your video. Very interesting! I didn't know that oak trees are good for dyeing. I have some natural mini skeins that I want to dye. Maybe next summer.
you had me looking at the trees on my walk today. Found an oak really nearby and even found my first oak gall! Went to a class on natural dyeing but still very nervous for some reason to try it by myself :( Getting closer to it though!
@@MijnWolden thankyou :) I actually went for it yesterday and it worked but still not sure i like the results? I filmed it so when it's edited it will be on my channel
not a dye plant as far as I know but I think the tall plant with white cones of little flowers at 6:46 is "melilot blanc" (melilotus albus) wich you can make vanilla essence from :) (please identify it properly if you want to attempt this I dont want to poison you xD
That's such a cool video. Do you maybe want to come to visit Dharamshala and do a video about the local plants here? It's quite different and less resources. But I am learning about it slowly. We for sure can buy walnuts from kashmir here. And i should research apricots. Have a great day
Every time I bring up natural dying at my fiberarts guild, someone always nay says it because of lightfastness. I know that you had to re-dye a sweater that you dyed with yellow onion skins. Is there any way to make these yarns more color-fast?
