We've been on the telly :-)

You may recall that earlier in the year I had a great time being filmed at Armley Mills Industrial Museum by the BBC for a new series, Glorious Gardens from Above. The programme showcased our Growing for Colour project - a community dye plant and edible garden - maintained and nurtured by Hyde Park Source and their group of enthusiastic volunteers and there was a short piece by yours truly showing our heritage dyeing group dyeing knickers (I know) with a selection of plants from the garden.

The series is now airing and our episode is part 4, currently available on BBC iplayer here. It will only be available for 4 weeks though, so don't delay!

If you're a gardening enthusiast you'll no doubt have heard of the show host, Christine Walkden. Her passion for the gardens she visits is amazing and she visits some beautiful gardens during the course of the series - well worth watching! (and no, we didn't get to go in the hot air balloon).

Armley Mills Dyeing Project - Dyeing begins!

A great day yesterday at Armley Mills producing the first samples from the Gott recipe book. We tried 3 different recipes and although we had to do a bit of tweaking of the recipes (distilling sulphuric acid and nitric acid weren't really in the spirit of the session!) we got some great results.

Scaling down the quantities was a challenge - the recipes have little information about the quantity of goods dyed by each recipe so I did some scaling down based more on using small amounts of ingredients and seeing what we could dye! I did calculate the right ratio of ingredients if not an accurate wof:wog (weight of fibre: weight of goods). As a result the colours were certainly in the right ballpark albeit pretty intense and there was plenty left in the baths. I'm sure this wouldn't have been the way dyehouses would have operated as it would have been very wasteful. This leads to questions about whether dyebaths were expected to exhaust after each bath, whether a vat would be used for each shade/range of shades and topped up? If there's a dyehouse dyer in your family history, maybe you could get in touch and let me know?

So, a great start with more excitement to come hopefully!

Growing for Colour Project at Leeds Industrial Museum

Growing for Colour is a new project I'm really excited to be involved with. The project is a collaboration between Leeds City Council, Hyde Park Source and DT Craft & Design (that'll be me, then!) to convert part of the outdoor space at the Leeds Industrial Museum site at Armley Mills into a colour garden, filled with interesting traditional dyeplants. Working with volunteers we'll be clearing the garden area, planting lots of exciting dyeplants, and dyeing fabrics and yarn with our homegrown and locally foraged dyestuffs.

Yesterday we had our first session. The sun shone bright and warm and the rain the previous night had nicely softened the ground, perfect for weeding and digging!

We had a bit of work to do refreshing the beds and borders after winter, and some of the plants have made themselves very much at home!

 A quick survey of the beds did reveal some tentative shoots of goldenrod,

tansy

and a couple of possible woad plants.

A nice healthy crop of madder was also spotted so I think we can look forward to some good reds!

I've been busy taking photos so I can do a bit of plant-spotting before next week as some of the plants aren't quite big enough to identify yet, although there may be some hollyhocks. We also have dyer's chamomile enjoying the spring warmth in planters along the front of the mill cottages.

A spot of seed planting after a picnic lunch courtesy of the Armley Town Street Hub's Pay as You Feel Cafe

After a hard day's work, our borders are almost ready for planting and our first crop of seeds is sown...

If you'd like to join us, simply come down to the Museum between 11am and 3pm on Tuesday. All materials are provided but bring a packed lunch and outdoor clothing (we've booked sunshine but you just never know!). Our next session will be preparing our yarns and fabrics for dyeing, doing a spot of foraging for local, wild-growing dyestuffs on the site and having a look at what you can re-purpose from your kitchen and cupboards to produce lovely colours - see you next week!