Journal
Natural Dyeing with Buddleia: How to Get a Rich Gold from Garden Weeds
Buddleia is everywhere. Railway sidings, canal banks, waste ground, back gardens. Most people cut it back and compost the flowers. But those spent blooms, the ones you’d normally dead-head or prune off, will give you a warm, old-gold yellow on wool. No specialist equipment, no expensive materials, and you don’t even need to pick the flowers at their best.
That last part matters. The butterflies and bees get first claim. You wait until the flowers are over.
What You Need
- Spent buddleia flowers (fresh or dried)
- Pre-mordanted wool (I use alum mordant at 8% weight of fibre)
- A stainless steel dye pan
- A small portable stove if you have one
- Washing soda or bicarbonate of soda (optional but useful)
- pH paper (optional)
- Gloves
The mordanting is the non-negotiable part. Don’t skip it. Unmordanted wool will barely take the colour and what it does take won’t last. If you’re new to mordanting, I cover the process in detail in my dyeing with foodstuffs course inside The Studio.
The Process
Step one: prepare the dye bath
Fill your pan with hot water and add the flowers. Pull the petals from the stems if you want a cleaner bath, though it’s not essential. You’ll see colour beginning to leach out almost immediately.
Add a small pinch of washing soda. Less than a teaspoon for a medium-sized pan. This keeps the bath slightly alkaline, which improves the yellow and counteracts the natural acidification that happens when you simmer plant material. If you don’t have washing soda, bicarbonate of soda works. If you have neither, leave it out entirely. It helps, but it’s not critical.
Bring to a gentle simmer and leave for around 20 minutes.
Step two: strain and cool
Strain out the plant material. You want the bath to cool to hand-hot before you add the wool. If you put wool into a very hot bath it will felt. Adding a little cold water cools it down without diluting the colour, because it’s the dye pigment you’re after, the volume of liquid doesn’t matter.
Step three: add the wool
Squeeze your pre-soaked, pre-mordanted wool gently and lower it into the bath. Don’t agitate it. Leave it to sit for a couple of hours, then overnight if you can. The longer it sits as the bath cools, the more evenly the colour takes.
Step four: rinse and dry
Rinse well in water of a similar temperature, squeeze gently, and dry away from direct sunlight.
The Colour
What you get is a warm mid-yellow. Not a sharp acid yellow, more of an old gold. The kind of colour you see in dried mosses and autumn grasses. It’s a colour that sits well with other naturally dyed fibres and doesn’t shout.
Buddleia yellow is reasonably lightfast in my experience, though like most natural dyes it will mellow over time rather than staying at full intensity.
A Note on Quantities
People often ask how much plant material to use. With foraged or garden plants there’s no fixed answer, because so many things affect colour: the soil the plant grew in, the weather that season, whether the flowers are fresh or dried, your local water. I had around 30 spent flower heads in this film, all dried, and got a good strong colour with plenty left in the dye bath.
If you’re getting a pale result, add more plant material next time. If you want to keep records of what produces what, note down roughly how much you used and your timings. But don’t let the absence of precision put you off starting.
When to Collect
You can use buddleia from late summer through to spring. Dead-head into a bag rather than the compost. Dry and store what you can’t use immediately, they’ll keep well in a paper bag in a cool dry place.
If you don’t have a buddleia of your own, look along railway lines, canal towpaths, and waste ground. In the UK it colonises these places readily. A word to councils and neighbours with the bush in a public space will often get you a bag of prunings without any difficulty.
This is part of my Natural Dye Plants series, where I work through the plants growing in my Scottish dye garden and the ones I forage locally. If you want to go further with natural dyeing, The Studio has courses, a community of makers, and a forum where questions like these get properly answered.
A Maker’s Wardrobe: Where This Project Begins
I have spent the last year simplifying my wardrobe down to things that actually fit me and make me feel good when I wear them. That process is done. What I’m starting now is something different.
This new project - which I’m calling A Maker’s Wardrobe - is about gradually adding things I’ve made, altered, or chosen with real deliberateness. Not a capsule wardrobe. Not starting from scratch. Not getting everything down to twenty items in neutral colours. I’ve done that version of a simplified wardrobe before, and those were not, I’ll be honest, particularly happy times.
What I’m working towards is a wardrobe that feels joyous. Handmade things and vintage things and brightly coloured printed dresses and visible mending and accessories I’ve stitched myself. Things that show I’ve paid attention to myself - not for anyone else’s benefit, but because I spend a lot of days alone in Scotland, and I’ve decided that’s reason enough to dress in a way I actually like.
In this first film I talk about where the project came from, what I’m keeping, and how I realised I’d already begun it without quite noticing - with a 1950s cardigan pattern, some yarn I’d been carrying around for years, and a problem I couldn’t find a solution for in any shop.
I’ve now made five versions of that cardigan. They’re all the same pattern and the same stitch count, and they look completely different from each other. The film explains how.
This playlist will grow slowly. That’s kind of the point of it.
Do Plant Dyes Fade? Two Chair Seats, 100 Years Apart
The first question people ask about botanical dyes is whether they fade.
My answer: yes, they do. All dyes fade. But if you prepare your fibres properly and choose your plants sensibly, natural dyes will not fade any more than most synthetic dyes. Often they’ll fade considerably less.
Here’s the evidence from my collection.
The 18th Century Piece: 1760s-1790s
This needlepoint was made as a chair seat, probably between 1740 and 1770. It’s worked in plant-dyed wool on even-weave linen - petit point at 22 stitches per inch for the animals, tent stitch at 11 stitches per inch for the background.
This was a working chair seat. It wasn’t wrapped in tissue and kept in a drawer. It was sat on, used, eventually removed from the chair when it wore out or the furniture was updated.
It’s approximately 250 years old.
When you compare the front and the back, you can see some fading - the colours have lightened. But they haven’t changed. The blues are still blue, the rusts still rust, the greens still green. The colour relationships remain intact. You can still read the design clearly.
The silk stitches have disappeared almost entirely - silk is more vulnerable to wear than wool - but the wool has survived with its colours stable.
The 19th Century Piece: 1860s-1880s
This is Berlin woolwork, probably made between 1860 and 1880. It came from a prayer chair, worked on the new double-thread canvas that made following printed patterns easier for amateur needleworkers.
It’s dyed with early aniline dyes - synthetic dyes that were revolutionary when they arrived. Bright turquoises, sharp vermilions, colours that were difficult or impossible to achieve with natural dyes.
The bottom section was hidden in the chair structure and never saw daylight. You can see what those colours originally looked like - that intense turquoise, those vivid reds.
The exposed section tells a different story. Everything has faded to murky beiges and washed-out pinks. The colour relationships have collapsed. The design is harder to read.
This piece is roughly 150 years old - a full century younger than the plant-dyed chair seat.
What This Tells Us
The problem with early aniline dyes wasn’t that they were synthetic. It was that the dyers hadn’t yet figured out lightfastness. They were chasing novelty and brightness, not durability. Contemporary accounts mention these dyes fading after a week in a shop window.
The 18th century chair seat was made by someone who expected it to last. Proper mordanting, stable dye plants, good materials. The dyer knew what they were doing.
The Practical Takeaway
Fading isn’t about natural versus synthetic. It’s about technique, mordanting, and choosing stable dyes.
The workhorses of 18th century dyeing - indigo, woad, madder, weld - were stable precisely because they’d been refined over centuries of use. Dyers knew how to prepare fibres properly, which mordants to use, which plants gave lasting colour. Many other plants, local plants, are fantastic dye plants too. The difference isn’t the plant, it’s the preparation.
If you’re working with botanical dyes now, you have access to that accumulated knowledge. Proper mordanting, good fibre preparation, and careful technique will give you lasting colour from all sorts of plants. Start with what’s growing around you. Use mordants. Experiment and take notes. The colours will last.
The Problem with “Play” in Creativity (And What It Actually Means)
A few weeks ago, someone in The Studio brought a perfectionism problem to our Friday gathering. She couldn’t start projects, or if she did, she felt she’d already ruined them before she’d really begun. Everyone offered advice, and the same word kept coming up: “Play. Just play with it.”
But I noticed I was having a strong physical reaction to that word. It conjured up bright colours, noise, children’s TV energy - everything that makes me uncomfortable. So I went for a walk to figure out what was going on.
Turns out, my understanding of creative play was completely wrong - or at least unnecessarily narrow.
What Play Actually Means
Play in making isn’t about being loud or messy or forcing yourself to be spontaneous. It’s simpler than that: making something with no set outcome, no purpose to measure against, and therefore no way to be perfectionist about it.
In this week’s Friday Film, I share three real examples from Studio members showing what this looks like in practice:
- Making quilts in deliberately uncomfortable colours
- Drawing with your non-dominant hand to see what emerges
- Understanding that nobody else knows what you were trying to make
Plus the story of my embroidered duck that, according to my friend, looks like it’s been run over. She’s not entirely wrong.
Watch: Creative Play & Perfectionism
If you struggle with perfectionism or getting started on creative projects, this might help. It’s not about adding another practice to your day - it’s about recognizing the play that’s probably already there in your making.
Crewel work fragment from Jacobean Bed hangings: What You Can Still See After 400 Years
A couple of months ago I bought this piece of embroidery as a study piece for The Studio. It’s a fragment of what was once a bed curtain, designed for privacy and warmth in a cold English manor house. About forty centimetres square, embroidered in crewelwork – plant-dyed wool on a linen (or possibly linen-cotton) twill. It dates from around 1610 to 1620.
The design is the Tree of Life, newly popular at the time as more and more designs from India reached England via the East India Company, founded in 1600. The curving branches and scrolling leaves you can see here would have extended from the bottom of the curtain right to the top. The ground may have had plants and animals amongst the trunks.
Because this is a fragment, a study piece, we can see the back – and this is where it gets interesting. The back would have been out of direct light, protected by the folds of the curtain. The threads haven’t faded much. The indigo blues are the same front and back. The browns too. The only colour change is from a deep pinky fawn to something paler.
That tells you which dyes lasted and which didn’t. Indigo – imported from India by the early 1600s – doesn’t fade. The browns, likely from oak bark or walnut hulls, held their colour. But that pinky fawn has shifted, lost its intensity where light could reach it.
The design was drawn onto the seamed linen. You can see the uncovered lines in some of the photos – places where the embroiderer didn’t quite cover the guide marks. Perhaps it was drawn freehand by the maker, or by a professional embroidery designer. Or perhaps it came from prick and pounce – a large-scale master drawing, the lines perforated with needle dots, fine charcoal or dried cuttlefish ink forced through the holes onto the fabric below.
The embroidery was probably done by the women of the household, though professional embroiderers did exist. A full set of bed hangings, creating a room within a room, would have taken up to fifty yards of fabric. It was likely a project worked on by many hands.
Bed hangings weren’t decorative extras. They were essential household equipment. When pulled closed around a bed, they gave warmth and privacy in houses without central heating, in rooms where multiple people slept. Even wealthy households had servants sleeping in the same rooms as their employers. The hangings were often worth more than the wooden bed frame they decorated.
What remains in this fragment: the blues that lasted, the fawn that faded, the visible design lines someone drew four hundred years ago, the way stitches follow curves and fill shapes, the seam where two pieces of linen were joined to make fabric wide enough for a bed curtain.
And at the back, protected from light all these years, something close to the original colours.
Looking closely at pieces like this is what we do in The Studio – investigating how things were made, working with traditional techniques, making with intention. More about The Studio here.
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