The beginning of Spring is one of my favorite moments of the year. I love seeing the slow rebirth of nature when the days get longer and longer. And the beginning of Spring is also my birthday on March 20th, so I always feel in sync with the idea of renewal that Spring brings. It’s the time when I feel most creative, ready to start new things and plant seeds of ideas that I want to grow.

Unfortunately, in the current global pandemic that we are living right now, our plans for this beginning of Spring have been a bit overturned. For many of us (especially if, like me, you live in the city), it means that we can’t really go for a long walk anymore, our access to nature is pretty limited, and of course there’s all the changes and the distress that we have to deal with on the daily.

But even if we forgot it, Spring has still arrived. Slowly. It isn’t affected by the disease, it’s doing well. Its flowers are starting to bloom, its bees are waking up. Nature is rebirthing itself and in it, we can find sources of comfort, peace, and little creative joys to go through these tough times.

On easy way to reconnect to nature these days is to try natural dyeing!

I’ve been very inspired by Maison Septembre, a french natural dyer who, for the past few days, has been doing natural dyeing tutorials on Instagram, easy to do with anything that you have at home, alone or with your family!

I had the pleasure to invite Doriane from Maison Septembre on our first Afternoon Knitting Party. We discuss natural dyeing, plants, the seasonal cycle and she gives us lots of tips and inspirations to get started! You can listen to the podcast (in French) or find the summary in English below:

Maison Septembre’s tips to get started with natural dyeing

Doriane gives us a few tips to get started:

Trust yourself and don’t be afraid to experiment! There are no mistakes in natural dyeing, only experiences.
To get pigments, you can use whatever you have at home because many plants have coloring properties (like tea, coffee, curcuma, onion peels…)
If you don’t have any white yarn, don’t worry! You can use any textile or even already dyed yarn. The only rules are to make sure that the fibres are mostly natural and that their original color is lighter than the one you are about to dye.

Natural dyeing or how to live with the seasonal cycle

In our conversation with Doriane, we talked a lot about the seasonal cycle in natural dyeing.

The life of a natural dyer is ponctuated by the harvests. You need to know where to find the plants and how to recognize them. Through the seasons, the color palette changes so the dyer has to adapt, wait sometimes for a few months to get that one color from a specific plant!

When the seasons pass, the plants change too. Doriane gives us the example of the nettle, which these days, in the beginning of Spring, is full of matter and will give a beautiful kaki green, while at the end of the season, when it’s dryer, its color will be less intense.

So practicing natural dyeing is a way to reconnect with the seasonal cycle, to enjoy and infuse yourself with each season. It’s also, for Doriane, a humble lesson to be faced with nature and all its wonders.

My natural dyeing experimentations

I was very inspired by Doriane, so I tried my hands at natural dyeing!

I had quite a few tools and pigments at home already because I’ve been wanting to try this for quite some time, but you can do natural dyeing with less.

I had a few pretty skeins of 100% natural wool that I was able to mordant with alun (but if you don’t have any mordant, no worries, it works too and will just give you less intense colors!)