Crafty Manolo

Ah, marigolds. So pretty. Pretty easy to grow, too. But they have another advantage for crafters: they make very pretty dyes. Using the flowers, you can make a range of yellows.

If you have a garden and a kitchen, you can create your own dyes from natural products to prettify your hand spun threads and yarns or your hand woven fabrics. And marigolds are far from the only plants you can use to dye things pretty colors.

Snapdragons and lilacs can be used to make green dyes. Virginia creeper and weeping willow will produce shades in the pink to salmon range. Choose indigo or woad for blues. Madder and rose hips can make red dyes, as can the lowly dandelion. Hey! That means even those of us who have terminal black thumb (the polar opposite of green thumb) can still make dyes from our own gardens!

Want to know more? You might start with these two articles I found:

This one is from Pioneer Thinking,

And this one is from Sheepy Hollow Farm Life.

Now… I wonder if I could get a couple daffodils to grow without keeling over too quickly.

Or maybe I’ll just play with the bumper crop of dandelions I already have!

via All Things Marbling

I adore marbled paper. I have older books that I caress because the endpapers delight me so. Yes, I’m a crafts geek. You knew that about me.

But my dears, marbling does not begin and end with endpapers (delicious though they may be, and frequently are!). Endpapers are just on option for marbling.

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via Tie-Dye Heaven

I’m coming out of the closet. I am an old-school, Earth mother, hippie at heart. No patchouli, please, though. It makes me gag.

The fact is – patchouli aside – I love all those back-to-the-garden crafts that people decided they’d created in the late sixties. One of those crafts is tie dyeing. It’s as simple as can be. Just a few basic tools and some creativity can turn boring white tablecloths into something like the Electric Kool Aid Acid wash number shown above.

Or you can do something that shows more obvious control of the medium, like this gorgeous lotus blossom motif on a marbled background:

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