Seasonal Natural Dye Workshop w/ Sue Ellen McCann

Sat + Sun, October 28-29, 2023

10am - 4pm

$200 + $20 materials fee

Dye plants have been used for thousands of years in arts and crafts and are just as relevant today as in the past. Whether your creative process includes weaving, embroidery, knitting, hooking, stitching, mending, sewing or any of the other creative ways to explore fiber, this class is for you. Natural colors can be vivid to subtle and can be manipulated for color value, hue and saturation. Using natural dyes can also reduce our impact on the environment and teach us more about our landscape, botany, chemistry and native plants.

Seasonal Natural Dye Workshop - Fall 2023 is the first in a series of natural dye workshops to be offered over the span of a year to aid in the gathering and harvesting of natural dye plants as they become available in our surrounding landscape. The use of native plants in the workshop will be augmented by “garden variety” plants that can be easily grown in your garden.

In this Fall workshop, we will be working with a silk/wool sports weight wool and wool rovings and will create dyes from walnuts, curly dock, hollyhocks, elderberry, cosmos, white sage and dyers chamomile. You will learn about growing and/or gathering each of these plants, how to prepare the wool to be dyed with three different mordants, how to create the dye baths and dye the wool, how to modify our colors for value, hue and saturation and how to record your process and findings.

About the Instructor: Sue Ellen McCann has 15 years of experience making and using natural dyes in her artwork. She currently uses her threads to create small needlepoint tapestries. She has an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and studied fiber arts and natural dyes at the Maiwa School of Textiles in Vancouver. Her art practice includes fine and fiber arts and she has an interest in botany and permaculture. Recently, she acted as the interim executive director for SebArts and is a painter and printmaker.