Colour paper with flowers
This is my very first go at creating colour, and the first time I have dyed anything since a tie-dye after-school club when I was eleven. I have no idea why I waited, because it was the most fun I have had on a rainy Sunday afternoon for a very very long time.
There were lots of things that I didn't do that I could have done, but I think the important thing is just having a go and seeing what happens. Soaking the paper in diluted soya milk and then letting it dry before using it will mean that the colour takes better and lasts longer.
Monty Don was really rude about how ugly his dyeing* garden was on Gardeners' World. I have chosen some beautiful varieties and I am quite confident that they will also be gorgeous in the garden (the marigolds are disco mixed for goodness sake, and there is at least one very well known top-level florist that is never without a coreopsis). If you would like to find out, I will be sowing and growing and documenting my dyer's garden in the Spring and I would love you to join me.
* I really struggle to remember that it is not a dying garden. Please forgive me when I make this mistake, because I will. Similarly, I cannot work out whether I am sending the bundle to you, a singular dyer and therefore it is a dyer's bundle, or whether the fact that I expect to sell more than one of them makes it a dyers' bundle. This is also why I favour the term Mothering Sunday, because the singular/plural tension of how many mothers we each have and how many have a Sunday spins me out a bit.
1.
Pick your flowers. I picked five heads of black scabious, fully out but not yet setting seeds. For any other use I would suggest waiting until flowers are dry before harvesting, but as I was going to steep in boiling water, I guessed it didn't matter. Also, if I waited for a dry day, this would never have happened.
2.
Put the flower heads in an unreactive, heatproof container. I chose glass, because I have glass jars everywhere...
3.
Pour over enough boiling water to just cover the flowers.
4.
This is way too much water for the flowers but I was too busy taking photos to say to stop pouring. You can intensify by reducing it on the stove once you have taken the flowers out, but I chose to just increase the steeping time (also because my father came up from Cornwall for Sunday lunch). Leave for at least an hour. I left for at least three.
5.
Pour the dye out and chose your paper for dyeing. This is 640gsm card (pretty thick and stiff) and I expected it to suck up the liquid but it really didn't. I had to hold it in for ten minutes or so to get any to absorb, and there were some tags I left for at least an hour (a dog walk length of time) which actually looked more even in colour. Thinner and/or more absorbent paper might behave differently so watch carefully.
6.
Straight dye gave this soft blue-green. No, it wasn't what I was expecting either, but lovely.
7.
The paper initially went bright pink in the dye, but once it dried and oxidised, it settled on this fantastic turquoise blue. L-R: with lemon, with a quarter of a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, straight dye.
