Journal

Natural Dyeing with Sweet Cicely

Sweet cicely (Myrrhis odorata) is one of my favourite dye plants, partly because it grows so well here in Scotland and partly because the whole studio smells of aniseed while you are working with it. It likes damp and shade and the shelter of hedges, and in this part of the country it does rather too well. I have a lot of it. Dyeing with it is one way of putting that to good use.

A bit of background

Sweet cicely is probably not a true native British plant. It most likely came over with the Romans, which would explain why it tends to be found near old settlements and buildings rather than in truly wild places. One of its old folk names is “the Roman plant.”

It has a long history of medicinal use. John Gerard wrote in 1597 that it was “very good for old people that are dull and without courage: it rejoiceth and comforteth the heart, and increases their lust and strength.” It was recommended for everything from babies’ colic to giving a general tonic to older women, and the roots and leaves were used as a blood purifier and wound ointment.

It was also used in cooking as a natural sweetener. The compound responsible for the aniseed scent, anethole, is sweeter than sugar, so sweet cicely was traditionally cooked with tart fruit like rhubarb and gooseberries to reduce the amount of sugar needed. During wartime rationing in the Second World War, people went back to foraging for it for exactly that reason.

Identifying it safely

If you are foraging for sweet cicely, please use a proper field guide with photographs and line drawings. Do not rely solely on an app.

The reason this matters is that sweet cicely belongs to the umbellifer family, the group of plants with umbrella-shaped flower heads. Some of its relatives can kill you. Hemlock is the obvious one. Sweet cicely itself is harmless, but you want to be certain.

The things to look for: the leaves are very soft and fern-like, not stiff or spiky. If you bruise them, they smell distinctly of aniseed. The leaves also have pale whitish markings near the base of the leaflets. Hemlock, by contrast, has a smooth stem often marked with red or purple blotching, and no aniseed smell.

Scent and colour

I have noticed that plants with strongly aromatic foliage tend to give good dye colour. Sweet cicely and fennel both smell of aniseed, and both give a bright, clean yellow. It is not a coincidence I think. The same compound, anethole, is responsible for both the scent and the dye potential.

Fennel may work better if you are somewhere warmer and drier than Scotland. If sweet cicely doesn’t grow near you, fennel is worth trying.

The method

This is a spring dye, which means speed matters. Early season leaves give the best colour, and you want to work quickly rather than simmering things for a long time. The fresher the leaves, the brighter the result.

What you need:

• As many sweet cicely leaves as will fit in your pan
• Washing soda (sodium carbonate)
• White wine vinegar
• pH strips or a pH meter
• Pre-mordanted wool or linen
• A stainless steel dye pan

Mordanting: The wool I used was pre-mordanted with aluminium potassium sulphate at 8%. If you want a video on how to mordant, leave a comment and I will make one.

Step one: make the dye bath

Strip the leaves from the stems and pack them into your pan. You want the pan fairly well filled but with enough space for the leaves to move around.

Add approximately one teaspoon of washing soda per large pan of water. The reason for this is that leafy dye baths tend to be slightly acidic, and the washing soda nudges the pH towards alkaline. What you are aiming for is something close to neutral. Add cold water to cover, put the lid on, and bring to just below a simmer. Keep it there for about 10 to 15 minutes. Do not boil hard and do not leave it for hours.

Step two: strain and adjust

Strain the leaves out into a large bowl or pan. Work fairly quickly at this point. Add cold water to bring the temperature down to hand hot.

Check the pH with a strip or meter. If the washing soda hasn’t been fully counteracted by the acidity of the leaves, the bath may still be on the alkaline side. You are looking for something close to neutral, around pH 7. If it reads higher, add a small amount of white vinegar, stir, and check again. Half a capful is usually enough. Do this somewhere well ventilated, as the reaction between the soda and vinegar fizzes and gives off fumes.

Step three: dye

Put your damp, pre-mordanted fibre into the dye bath while it is hand hot. If the bath were any hotter at this stage you could felt the wool, so check before the yarn goes in.

Leave for about an hour. The colour takes up quickly. You are looking for a bright yellow with a slight green quality to it, fairly fluorescent in good light. Linen takes up a similar yellow, slightly flatter than the wool but still good.

Rinse the yarn, hang to dry somewhere out of direct light, and leave for two to three weeks before washing. This settling period lets the dye pigments fully bond with the fibre. After that, wash in a pH neutral detergent.

What you end up with

A bright, slightly yellow-green. Not a dull yellow. This is one of the more satisfying spring dyes because the colour has a lot of life to it.

The linen came out well too. If you prefer to make sample books or dye cloth rather than yarn, sweet cicely works for that just as well.

A New Series: Dyeing with Plants

In 2000, I left my job as an art gallery curator, retrained in horticulture, and set up a cut flower business. I grew everything myself - every stem for every wedding, every bouquet sent by post, everything arranged for every event came from this garden in Stirlingshire.

There was one exception. A bride wanted roses at a time when I had none, and we compromised on English-grown ones. Two days before the wedding I got a call to say they’d actually be coming from Kenya. They arrived smelling of chemicals, stiff as sticks, wrong in every possible way against everything else in the arrangement. I never ordered anyone else’s flowers again.

That stubbornness is still here. It’s now just pointed at a dye pot.

What this series is

This is a series about botanical dyeing - specifically about what’s in my dye bath that week. Not a syllabus, not a planned curriculum. I’ll film what’s ready, what’s at its peak, and that’s what we’ll work with. If something is past its best when I get to filming, it waits for next year.

I am plant first, colour second. Most dyeing content starts from the colour you want and works backwards. I work the other way - I look at what’s there, what’s abundant, what’s ready, and I put it in the pot. The colour is what comes.

How I learned, and what I found out about my soil

I learned to dye with Debbie Bamford - the Mulberry Dyer, and a world expert on madder. After that first course, I dabbled for a few years, picking it up and putting it down. It wasn’t until I decided to make a jumper dyed entirely from garden plants that I became properly hooked.

That jumper now belongs to my elder daughter, who wears it a lot. It’s held up well.

I started building a dye garden, and fairly quickly discovered that you couldn’t get much worse conditions for one. We’re acidic, wet, and claggy. Most of the traditional dye plants - weld, madder, indigo - either failed completely or sulked. Dyer’s chamomile does two years here and then gives up. Other people complain it takes over their gardens.

So I did what anyone does when the textbook doesn’t apply: I ignored the textbook. I started thinking like someone who is outside the guild system entirely, way back in time, just looking around at what’s there and giving things a go. And as you can see from this blanket, there’s plenty of colour to be had.

(I do have some madder growing in the polytunnel. It won’t survive outside in my conditions, but I’m hopeful the tunnel will protect it. It takes four years to reach harvestable size, so this is a slow experiment. If it works, it will add orangey reds that I can’t currently get here.)

On taking plants

I don’t forage rare things. Everything I use is either grown here as a deliberate crop, or it’s what I’d call borderline invasive - the kind of plant where, if a thousand people came picking, there would still be plenty of it left. Nettles, docks, bracken. Plants that give without any worry.

What I won’t do is hunt something down because it gives a particular colour if you dig up the root. Roots aren’t forageable. And beyond that, there are so many colours that are just freely given by abundant plants - chasing a pink or a teal from something uncommon is unnecessary, and it’s also a way of exploiting what we’re supposed to be working with.

Resist the novelty. Rein it back. See what you actually have.

What the colours look like

The blanket I’m working on at the moment was started during lockdown. Mini skeins, each stripe a different plant, double-sided, knitted in strips. It’s almost finished - one more stripe to go this year. The colours have surprised me repeatedly. Things I expected to give very little gave a lot. The palette is much wider than people assume when they think about local, foraged dyeing.

The threads on the studio table - dyed embroidery threads from garden and local plants - are what years of this practice produces. There’s a full rainbow in them. No sense of making do, no muted compromise. These are threads worth stitching with, and worth selling.

That’s what plant-first dyeing looks like here, in this particular piece of Stirlingshire, on this particular soil.

What you’ll get from this series

Each film will be about one plant or group of plants - what they are, where I find them, how I use them, and what to expect in terms of colour. Because many of these plants have grown in Scotland for a very long time, there’s often history and folk use attached to them too, and I’ll bring that in where it’s interesting.

If you’re watching from somewhere with different soil, different climate, different plants - some of what I use won’t work for you. That’s fine. The point isn’t to follow my exact plants. It’s to find what’s abundant where you are, and start there.

A Remarkable Textile Exhibition in Paris (On Until July 2026)

I ended up in Paris rather by accident. I’d flown to Naples and decided to come back by train: Naples to Turin, Turin to Paris, then through the Channel Tunnel to London. Two days in Paris meant I could see several exhibitions, and one of them was at the Halle Saint-Pierre in Montmartre.

I want to mention the space itself before I get to the work. The Halle Saint-Pierre is an outsider art space: folk art, art brut, things that exist outside the main establishment. It sits in the middle of Paris’s textile district about 5 minutes from Montmartre, it is surrounded by shops selling fabrics, yarns, buttons, zips. And the space itself felt genuinely alive. The bookshop was full. The library was full. The café was busy, there were people having head massages, workshops clearly running. It’s the kind of art space we all want more of.

At the moment, right through to the end of July 2026, they have an exhibition called L’Étoffe des rêves (The Stuff of Dreams). Thirty-six textile artists, two floors of work. It’s extraordinary and, honestly, quite overwhelming. I could only take in so much.

So rather than attempt all thirty-six, I want to tell you about three artists whose work stopped me.

Lili Simon

Lili Simon was born in Alsace in 1980. She trained at the Beaux-Arts but her practice has always been more outsider than establishment, taking magazines, catalogues, adverts and subverting them, poking fun at them.

During lockdown, she became interested in needlepoint and started thinking about those very camp, kitsch landscape canvases from the 1960s and 70s. The deer, the mountains, the idealised coastal scenes. Women spending hundreds of hours on these complicated pieces, sitting and thinking. And she started wondering: what are their fantasies? We talk endlessly about the male gaze. But when a woman is sitting stitching for hours and hours, what is she looking at in her mind’s eye?

Lili Simon took some adverts featuring men in their underwear (the Calvin Klein kind of aesthetic) and inserted them into the canvases.

She did this in two ways. In some pieces she has carefully unpicked the original stitches and restitched over them to create her figure. In others she has cut the original needlepoint, made a new panel, and sewn it in. Very different techniques, quite different results.

I found them very funny. Understated. And it occurred to me that this is also a genuine technique for craft activism: taking an existing textile object and replacing elements of it with something entirely unexpected.

Aurélia Jaubert

Aurélia Jaubert was born in 1967 and grew up in a household where looking carefully at things mattered. Her mother, Marie-José Jaubert, wrote La Mer assassinée in 1978, a book documenting pollution along the French coastline. Her father, Alain Jaubert, spent his career making documentary films about how to look closely at paintings. That’s the kind of household this is.

She began her big tapestry works in 2017, after years of collecting old needlepoints from car boot sales and flea markets. She has always found them a bit naff, she says, and also beautiful, and also important. Because all of that needlework corresponds to a condition of women. Right up into the 1950s, there were books about how to be a good housewife and how to occupy your leisure time.

Her ambition from the start was to take all of those small domestic pieces and make something monumental from them, something on the scale of a medieval or Renaissance tapestry, with a foreground, a middle ground, a background, figures, and stories.

The two works at the Halle Saint-Pierre took up an entire wall. They are extraordinary. There is so much to look at: hunting scenes, women in crinolines, classical figures, animals, all assembled from pieces that might span a hundred years of women’s making. She also uses the backs of some sections deliberately, so you see the workings, something like a pencil sketch showing through, which softens the weight of it all slightly.

People were standing in front of these for a long time.

There is a short film on YouTube of Aurélia working in her studio: cutting needlepoints, assembling pieces, walking round and round the work. It’s worth watching.

Shao Liyu Chen

Shao Liyu Chen was born in Beijing in 1946. She grew up in a traditional courtyard house in the heart of old Beijing, in the hutongs, the network of alleyways that ran through the old city. She went to university, became a professor of philosophy, and in the early 1980s her husband left for Paris to study contemporary art. She joined him five years later.

In Paris, she and her husband moved through museums and galleries, absorbing Western art. She began working for a French interiors company, bridging Chinese and Western aesthetics. And then she made a return visit to Beijing and found that the city of her childhood had been largely demolished. Modern towers had replaced the hutongs. The courtyards were gone.

She came back to France and began to make collages. Everything in the exhibition came from her own collection: these pieces were never for sale, never intended for galleries. They are made from tiny scraps of fabric, assembled into dense, teeming cityscapes and landscapes of a Beijing that no longer exists.

The level of detail is remarkable. People stood in front of these for a long time too, finding things: a bicycle, a fire, a dog, a cart. Made from the smallest fragments of cloth.

She is nearly eighty. She came to this work in her forties, after a career in philosophy and cultural work. Everything in the exhibition belongs to her personally. That felt significant.

Why these three

These are by no means the only artists worth seeing in this exhibition. But they are the three that connected most directly to conversations I find happening all the time in The Studio: about repurposed work, about the labour of women, about memory, about what we do with the small scraps of things we accumulate and don’t quite know what to do with.

If you have old needlepoints piling up. If you have a bag of tiny fabric scraps. If you’re wondering what those things are actually for, this exhibition has something to say about that.

The Halle Saint-Pierre, 2 rue Ronsard, Paris 18th. L’Étoffe des rêves runs until 31 July 2026. Open Monday–Friday 11am–6pm, Saturday 11am–7pm, Sunday 12pm–6pm.

Making a Bag from a UFO: 500 Years of Canvas Work

A Victorian needlepoint chair cover that never made it onto a chair. Someone worked and worked on it. All those fine stitches, those white flowers against the dark ground. And then for whatever reason, they just stopped, finished but unused. Maybe they’d planned a set of chairs and never got to the rest. Maybe the cover simply didn’t fit the seat.

I found it on Etsy. And I bought it. And I made it into a bag.

This post is the companion to the film below, which goes into more detail about the history. But the bag is the heart of it, so let’s start there.

The bag itself

This is part of my Maker’s Wardrobe project: a series about making things intentionally, things that will actually be worn, that go with what I already have, and that connect me to a longer history of making. 

The needlepoint is Berlin wool work, mid-to-late Victorian. The flowers are either water lilies or magnolias. I genuinely couldn’t decide when I first got it, and I’m still not entirely certain. (One of them might be a water lily. The leaves on the others are very definitely magnolia.) It doesn’t matter enormously. What matters is that someone spent a long time on it, stitch by stitch, working from a chart, and the result is quite beautiful.

To make the bag, I cut three pieces of tweed in the same shape as the needlepoint. Two for the lining, one for the back. I sewed each pair together by hand, put the lining inside, turned both tops together and ironed them. Then I added running stitches in plant-dyed thread across the grid in the backback, which quilted everything together and stopped it feeling floppy. There’s a small pocket in the lining for keys. The handles and catch came from Etsy: leather, with stitch holes.

It’s a fairly simple make, in practical terms. The needlepoint did all the real work, 150 years ago.

A UFO: and why I love them

A UFO is an Unfinished Object. In The Studio, the online creative community I run, we talk about them a lot. Our own unfinished things, yes, but also the things that have been passed down, or found, or stumbled across. Objects that carry someone else’s time and intention and stopped, for reasons we’ll never know.

I have a particular fondness for other people’s unfinished work. There’s something about it that I find easier to approach than my own. The pressure is different. You’re finishing something, not starting it. You’re continuing a line rather than beginning one.

The woman who worked this chair cover: I don’t know her name, or where she lived, or why she stopped. But her hands made this, stitch by stitch. And now it’s a bag I’ll actually use.

Where canvas work comes from

I want to say something about the broader history here, because it changes the way I look at the bag.

Canvas work, embroidery worked in tent stitch onto an evenweave canvas, has been done by women in Britain and Europe for at least 500 years. The technique in this bag is identical to work that has sat in aristocratic houses since the Elizabethan period.

The earliest examples I have are Elizabethan slips: small embroidered motifs, usually flowers or plants, worked in wool and silk on linen canvas in tent stitch, then cut out and appliquéd onto velvet or wool backgrounds. They’re called slips after the horticultural term: a cutting taken to propagate a plant. The designs came from printed herbals and natural history books: William Turner’s A New Herball, John Gerard’s The Herball. Women were working directly from the same botanical publications that physicians and naturalists used.

Mary Queen of Scots made work like this during her long imprisonment. An envoy of Elizabeth I reported that she said she spent her days at her needle, and that the diversity of colours made the work seem less tedious, and she continued until the pain made her stop.

The same technique, largely unchanged, runs through the Georgian period, into the early Victorian era, and then into the Berlin wool work craze of the mid-19th century.

Berlin wool work: and why it was ridiculed

Berlin wool work arrived in Britain from Germany in the 1820s, and by the 1840s it had become the dominant form of needlework for middle-class women. The patterns, printed on gridded paper with one square per stitch, were sold as single sheets or in women’s magazines. The wool came from Merino sheep in Saxony, spun in Gotha, dyed in Berlin. The colours were vivid and new, made possible by advances in dyeing and, from the 1850s, by the new aniline dyes.

And almost immediately, people started sneering at it.

The objections were partly aesthetic. William Morris felt it was destroying real needlework skills, reducing embroidery to mechanical square-filling. And they were partly social. Berlin work was popular. It was accessible. It was being done by middle-class women in large numbers, following charts, making choices that had already been made for them by publishers in Germany.

The Royal School of Needlework was founded in 1872 partly as a direct response to Berlin work, to restore the older, freer embroidery traditions that were being crowded out.

Here is what I find interesting about this: the objection to Berlin work was that women were following someone else’s design rather than drawing their own. But Elizabethan embroiderers were also following published patterns — the herbal woodcuts, the printed model buchs. The difference was that the Berlin work system made this visible and industrial. The chart had already made every colour decision for you, and critics could see the mechanism too clearly.

Morris, who objected to this, sold needlework kits through Morris & Co.: linen ready-drawn, threads included. The kit principle was identical. What differed was the class of customer.

The technique in my bag is the same as work that has been in grand houses for 500 years. The only thing that changed was who was doing it.

What the fading tells us

One of the things I find most striking when I look at surviving Berlin work is how muted the colours often are now. The aniline dyes that made Berlin work so exciting were unstable. Within a couple of decades, those vivid crimsons and purples faded to something much more subdued, more “Victorian” in the way we now imagine Victorian, which is to say quieter and duller than it actually was.

This piece, a piece of upholstery where the cushion kept one part in the dark, it shows the original colours against the ones that have faded in light.

My bag is unfaded, presumably it stayed packed away. The colours are still strong. Which means I’m seeing it much closer to how the maker saw it: bright, vivid, probably considered rather fashionable.

That matters, I think. We judge Berlin work partly by what it looks like now, which is a ghost of what it looked like then.