This summer I wanted to try dyeing with plants and herbs. This is how it went.
1. First I bought two books. The first one was about the history of coloring with plants and herbs, and the cultural importance of colors in general (very interesting!). The second one was a recipe book.
2. Then, I purchased the needed equipment: a digital balance, a thermometer, cans, a strainer, as well as some chemical powder that helps to attach the color, and some iron powder. (Copper powder I did not buy because it is said to be toxic.)
3. As soon as we got to the summer house I took a basket and went looking for plants. I decided to try the most common ones that I saw were plenty. These were heather, nettle, lupin, (and some others that I could not find in the English dictionary).
4. I cut the plants, weighted and marked them with post-it notes. This was a true inscription exercise!
5. In the evening, I put the plants into cold water (on the sauna terrace) and let them soak over the night.
Ritva was following my progress. 
6. The next day, I started to prepare color soups. Normally, you need to boil the plants for one hour. Heather needs three!!! The grill of our summer cottage proved to be a perfect laboratory. 
7. I needed to let the temperature fall into +40 C before I put the yarn into the soup. 
8. Then I took the yarn away from the soup just to add the attachment chemical (called aluna). About 2 g.
9. At this stage the camera ran out of batteries. But I had to be very careful in the dying process, and I could not let the temperature rise above 90 C (I could not let it boil). The yarn had to soak in the hot color soup for 45-60 min.
Then I let the it to get cool and rinsed and washed the yarn in the lake.
This went on from one day to another. In the end of the week I had a wooden pole full of yarn skeins with at least fifteen different shades of yellows shifting from olive and pine to ochre and rust.
Almost everybody I have mentioned this fabulous color exploration has asked me: "So what are you going to make of it? Will you knit something?" At that point I hadn't given any thought to the potential use value of this production. Discovering wonderful colors from the ordinary plants had been the thing - at least for now.
