Colours are a hugely personal experience, and while in design terms there are rules and reasoning why some combinations work and others don’t, it’s still true that two people can experience the same colours in entirely different ways. I found the poem below on a website called Plant Dyed Wool which runs courses on dyeing wools with natural dyes, as well as weaving and felting the results.
I’ve tried dyeing my own embroidery threads before and loved the results, but found it too time consuming to keep up (if I wanted to do any stitching/designing, too). There’s somehing very appealing about natural dyeing, though, and I’m going to get around to trying it out one day. I love tapestry weaving (my header above is an extract from one of my small pieces) but have just in the last couple of days started hankering to go back to basics with some ‘pure’, solid, traditional weaving on an old-fashioned peg loom – nothing fancy, just simple, cleansing ‘zen’ weaving, for its own sake.
[I find that I go through phases of stitching then switching back to weaving, then back to stitching again. They’re very different crafts, but have the reassuring familiarity of working with threads, fibres, wools etc. There’s a project coming that will combine weaving, needlework, music, and possibly some fiction, too, once I’ve completed this exploration of bargello. There’ll be a break for a while from the appearance of new designs, but I am looking forward to putting my time and energies into it, and I think the results will be worth it.]
It was on the search for a peg loom that I stumbled across the Plant Dyed Wool site. Theirs are the only peg looms I have found with character (click here to see what I mean), made out of gorgeous grained, knotted natural wood, rather than wood with the life planed out of it. Anyway, to return to the point, it was on this site that I discovered the poem below, written by Skye, the daughter of the dyeing-weaving-felting lady, Jane Meredith. I love the vivid colours that streaks through it, and found it very evocative.
Blue fingers planted this garden
Where there is gold in the petals and leaves
Where green breathes
Then turns blue
Blue softly turns pink
As it dies by the river
And wool white as a swan
Is dipped
Kingfisher red
tanglecrafts.wordpress.com 