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                                           THE UFFINGTON WHITE HORSE OF OXFORDSHIRE Our ancestors have been using chalk to create images since prehistory. The earliest chalk drawings date back to the Paleolithic era, and are up to 40,000 years old. This representational, figurative art, found in caves around the world is the earliest evidence of human creativity and abstract thought.   As those of us old enough to remember the school blackboard and their teacher covered in chalk dust will know, chalk is a soft, white,...

Image: My only two weld plants growing in a large pot Due to the cold, everything has been rather slow on the growing front this year. I've been hovering over my sprawl of coreopsis plants for weeks, thinking they're going to burst into flower at any minute, and then finally, last week, the first flowers popped open, adding a very welcome, bright splash of golden yellow to the garden. Coreopsis is really easy to grow and look after. You can read more about using it as a natural dye in Claudia's blog 'NATURALLY DYEING WITH DYER’S COREOPSIS (Coreopsis tinctoria)' Image: The...

Having threatened for several months to write a blog on what I’ve been up to in the garden, I thought I ought to follow through! I get so much joy from spending time in my garden and i'm keen to see how much I can grow in the space that I have. I'd also like to share my progress and show you what is possible with limited space so that you too can reap the benefits of growing your own dye plants. A couple of years ago I claimed a sunny little patch of the garden that backs onto my...

 INTRODUCTION Although the natural world envelopes us in green there is, surprisingly, no single natural plant dye that can give a bold, bright green.  There are plenty of plants that yield up yellow dyes, such as dandelion, golden rod, dyer’s chamomile and others which, with a little iron modifier, will give subtle shades of sage, olive and mossy greens.  But to achieve a strident green that would make Robin Hood proud you need to start with blue and overdye with yellow. For those who don't know, Robin Hood is the legendary outlaw of English folklore who famously stole from the...

INDIGO – KING OF DYES How to prepare, use and maintain an indigo vat.    INTRODUCTION Indigofera tinctoria Indigo is truly the King of Dyes.  Dyeing communities around the world have been extracting this intense, natural blue pigment from the leaves of  the Indigofera plant for millennia.  The oldest known indigo-dyed textile in the world was found at an excavation site in Peru in 2009, and is believed to be over 6000 years old. Indigofera is a large genus of over 750 species of flowering plants belonging to the pea family, Fabaceae.  They are widely distributed throughout the tropical and...