Kid’s Club 2024

I have had a wonderful summer teaching the Busy Bees Kid’s Club children the amazing colours found in the plants in our dye garden. I introduced them to: –

SOLAR DYEING – IMMERSION DYEING – LAKE PIGMENTS.

For this project, we used: –

Madder roots which we dug from the dye garden

Marigold flowers picked from the garden

Walnut husks gathered from underneath the walnut tree

Onion Skins which we had been collecting for a few weeks

SOLAR DYEING

Each child made their own set of dye jars with the plant material and strands of white yarn covered in water, applied the lid, and left them on a shelf in the greenhouse to allow the sun’s rays to work their magic.

     

                     

                                               

 

                 

 

2 weeks later the children removed the yarn from the jars, rinsed, and dried it ready for the next project which was to make a set of napkin rings.

 

 

 

IMMERSION DYEING 

In the meantime, we made four large stock pots into dye baths so each child could dye a set of cotton napkins – again using madder root, marigold flowers, walnut husks, and onion skins.

                                       

 

 

 

 

 

Marigold                        Onion                                 Walnut                                   Madder

 

 

 

 

 

 

After rinsing the children hang their napkins to dry in the shade.

 

 

When completely dry they folded their napkins and threaded them through their lovely solar-dyed napkin rings.

 

 

 

 

 

LAKE PIGMENTS

After extracting the dye to colour the napkins, we used this dye material to make lake pigments for watercolour painting. The children enjoyed the whole process from watching the pigment settle, to filtering and drying, grinding and mulling and making their pots of paint where they made their watercolour paintings into calendars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Watercolour painting using madder and marigold lake pigments