When I started out natural dyeing, I depended on dyestuffs that I’d foraged from my local surroundings, or else ordered online. But in the last two years I’ve become increasingly able to grow plants that will yield colour in my own garden. And this last month I’ve achieved a satisfying array of colours from plant…
Category: context
Produce, Production, and Productivity
The summer months are bit of a funny time for an academic. With the respite from the demands of teaching-related duties also comes conference season and the sense that these weeks are the chance to get done the writing and research you’ve not had time for since September. But summers–especially hot, sunny summers like the…
Cuckoos and Owls
I write this while seated in my garden on a sunny late May morning. I’ve been eating my breakfast and drinking tea while watching the birds go about their business in the ash trees and holly bushes. Blue tits and great tits are darting about between the branches; magpies, rooks and woodpigeons having various minor…
Spring, finally!
Well it’s been an extremely long winter. Lennoxtown was cited as an example of snowed-in communities in the ‘red zone’ of central Scotland during the snowstorms of early March, and I had certainly never seen anything like that amount of snow in all my life. The dogs enjoyed it rather more than the hens did….
Winter Visitors
Over the last couple of days we’ve been visited by several inches of snow, which for someone who grew up on the coast of south east England is pretty exciting. The hens aren’t too impressed, however. But this blog post is titled after two other winter visitors. At the end of October, I glanced out…
Wild and Garden Growth
Having a good-sized garden of my own for the first time has been something of an adventure. In the seven to eight months since we moved in, I have been in turns delighted, excited, terrified, bewildered and frustrated by the responsibility and opportunity of this patch of land we call our garden. There is the…
Crow: On Corvids, Myth, and Inter-Species Encounters
A couple of months ago I got a commission from my mother-in-common-law, as a gift for her sister. She asked me to make a small brooch: a crow. The specific bird was in reference to the book Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter’s cycle of poetry-come-novella in which a widower and his sons…
The Coming of Spring
It’s been three weeks since I planned to write this post, and I kept thinking that I’d missed the boat, it would be too late to talk about my wooly celebrations of spring’s tentative arrival. (Such as these madder-dyed Martenitsa in the garden). But no. Spring’s presence still feels rather provisional, and while this was the…
Home and Epiphany
The sixth of January seems like an auspicious day to write a blog post, especially the first of the new year (and the first for many weeks). The prolonged midwinter pause was due to busyness and big changes: buying a house and moving to the countryside! In November we moved to a village at the…
Autumnal Inspiration
I’m not long back from a week with my family down in Whitstable, Kent. Down in south east England the berries are just starting to ripen and the leaves to turn and fall, but despite these hints of autumn the days are still warm and dry. Up north in Scotland, it has been autumn for a while…
On Scottish Lichen Dyeing
I love dyeing with lichen because there’s plenty of the stuff available here in Scotland, you don’t need to mordant, you get colours other than lemony yellow, and it leaves a beautiful earthy smell on the dyed wool. So far I have dabbled a bit with the ‘boiling water method’, getting lovely autumnal shades from a…
Fox and Badger
Last October at two separate workshops I learnt about natural dyeing and needle-felting, though I never put the two together until this spring. I had run out of undyed spun yarn for natural dyeing experiments, and so was using unspun undyed fibre instead. I didn’t know what I was going to do with all these small…
Anna Fisk 