Before you compost those teabags, onion skins and avocado pits and skins, unlock their colour secrets and discover romantic pink, moody violet, cosy olive green, chocolate brown and vibrant golds and oranges.

In this beginner workshop, you will start with learning how to fix the dye (mordant) to the fabric to ensure your colour discoveries don’t wash out or fade excessively. Then you will learn make a dye bath using readily available garden scraps and food waste that would otherwise end up in your compost heap.

With the simple technique of immersion dyeing, Leya will show you best practice techniques for ensuring clear, even dyeing throughout the entire piece of fabric.

All materials will be provided, and we will be dyeing a pair of handwoven, 100% Indian khadi cotton napkins.

https://www.rowanlanefibres.com/product/compostable-colour

About Leya:
Leya is a local botanical dyer and educator working primarily with natural materials such as wool, linen and silk. She lives and works in Winchester, and her work is heavily inspired by the cycles of nature, colour, and simple pleasures; the art of slow, seasonal living. Leya is the co-author of a self-published book, ‘Summer Of Making: knit heirlooms using natural dyes’ available digitally from her website, as well as a teaching contributor on the Natural Dyes Workshop offered by the Herbal Academy.
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Although she has a background in teaching, her career also extended into retail visual merchandising and styling. Her many artistic and lifestyle passions – fashion, sustainability, gardening and growing, weaving, photography, interior design- led her to begin her foray into botanical dyeing, which she has grown into her own fibre dyeing small business, selling mainly botanically dyed knitting yarns and other naturally dyed crafting supplies.