Friday 4 December 2009

NATURAL DYEING WITH LILY POLLEN

A current experiment with natural dyes involves using lily pollen. I have tried with a very small quantity of pollen used to colour hemp wool. The final colour was indeed a bright yellow, but the colour was fairly uneven. I am not sure if this uneven colour was the result of not using enough pollen for the amount of hemp wool or just the nature of this dyestuff. I will experiment again in the near future with a larger amount of pollen. Collecting the pollen from lilies is rather time consuming so I imagine the next experiment will also be on either a small garment (i.e. silk shawl) or hemp wool.