I am growing a dye garden at home, it is something I have wanted to do for ages so earlier this year I took myself on a one day workshop at West Dean College in West Sussex and spent the day with Vicky Way, a textile artist and teacher who taught us how to plan a dye garden and sent us off with some solar dye pots. The colours were so lovely, we used Achillea, Woad, Weld, Sulphur Cosmos and Coreopsis Grandiflora which was my absolute favourite colour. Since then I have been preparing my garden, planting seeds, planting the weld and madder plants that were given to us on the day and setting up my dye area. Below from left to right: Weld, Madder Dyer’s Chamomile seedlings, Japanese Indigo seedlings and Calendula. I will plan to add more plants next year and the madder will take 3 years to grow enough to be harvested.
My dye kitchen is located underneath the roof / porch overhang at the front of the house. It reminds me of the mud pie kitchens I used to build as a child. I loved being under our front porch making mud pies and even more so when it was raining so I feel very magical outside making my dye vats.
I have used blue faced Leicester yarn and tops, calico and cotton muslin to experiment with in my first dye session.
The yarn and fabric ready for mordanting. I used 5g of cream of tartar and 20g of alum in the pot, simmered it for a few minutes and then left it to soak overnight.
The solar pots, especially with the current heatwave have worked incredibly well and are by far my favourite method of dyeing fabric and yarn.
Weld – Harvested June 15th 2026
I chose to mordant and dye the fabric at the same time and as the weld was in fairly large chunks, it all went in the same pot, boiled for an hour and then left overnight. It had 24 hours before rinsing. The muslin was un-bleached so I wasn’t sure how yellow the yellow would turn out and even in the pot it looked a little bit pale. However as soon as I started rinsing the muslin out, I was really happy with the quality of the yellow.
Rae Reynolds 