Natural Dye Workshop

Sunday October 6, 9 am – 3 pm taught by Lopez Library Artists in Residence, Julia Mira and Barbie Paulsen.

Please RSVP to Nikyta@lopezlibrary.org to register for this free class as space is limited.

What colors are hiding in the plants of Lopez? Join Julia, amateur dyer, and Barbie, another amateur dyer, as we introduce the basics of natural dyes. It’s a lesser known fact that nearly any plant will produce a color on yarn. With the right chemistry and heat, many of those colors will be washfast and lightfast.

Our goal with this day is to introduce the “how” of getting color from plants onto fiber. Which plants give stronger colors? What steps are necessary to keep the dye attached to the yarn? Which steps can be changed? Learn from our experiences and our mistakes and then go forth and make your own explorations. How hard is this anyway? We’ll have the set up to do a day of hands on dyeing. You can even bring a baggie of a plant you’re curious about. We’ll test it in a mini dyepot of its own.

We will provide yarn ready for dyeing for those who want to collect color samples. We will have some dye baths of natural dyes from Lopez and elsewhere. We will also have a dye bath for small batches of whatever plant materials people would like to test. Do bring a small baggie of plant material if there’s something you’d like to try out. At the end of the test runs, we’ll snip a piece from everyone’s dyed sample so everyone can have a sampler booklet.

The colored quilt pictured above is a dye sample of natural dyes collected from Lopez by Julia Mira.