Journal

Studio Exclusive: Heather for Natural Dyeing: Golds and Greens

At the heart of my love for creating colour from plants is place, connection, and a spiralling back through time. A thousand years or more, to when colour was coaxed from nearby plants in much the same way as I do now. Textiles were treasured, not disposable. Colour was earned.

I am not drawn to the tidy, packaged pots of powdered dye. That is someone else’s story. Mine is rooted here, in the plants underfoot, in the scraps I gather from garden, hedgerow, kitchen, and hill. It matters to me that the colours come from this place, in this season.

It is easy to imagine the past in washed-out browns, but that is a trick of time and fading fibres. Our ancestors loved bright colour. They prized the purest yellow from weld, the deep orange from madder, the luminous blue of indigo. When cloth survives, it often shows only the gentled remains of those shades, except in the hidden seams or protected fragments, where the original garishness still sings through.

The Scottish plants I tend to use do give softer, more muted tones. Grey-pinks, olive greens, peach, silver. These are the colours I am drawn to myself. Earthy. Weathered. But in the earliest periods, these quieter plant dyes would likely have made up the whole palette. There is little evidence of access to strong imported colours in those times. What was used was what could be gathered, grown, or foraged locally.

Heather is an exception. One of the traditional dye plants of the Highlands, it offers a surprising richness. When you harvest it just before it flowers, it gives a glowing golden yellow, the kind that lifts the dullest grey and makes it sing. And it asks very little of you. Simmer the flowering tops for half an hour, add your yarn, and wait. No alchemy. Just time and heat.

Below, I have included some tips to get the most from it, more lightfast, longer-lasting shades. But honestly, even if you throw it in a pot over a campfire and stir in some fence-gathered fleece, you will get something. Some trace of colour and place.

There is a theory that the earliest tartans were not planned patterns, but checks and stripes that came from weaving together home-dyed threads. Each batch different. Each colour the result of what could be gathered that season. It rings true to me. That piecemeal beauty. That sense of the cloth being not just worn but witnessed.

That is how I work. A hundred grams of fibre at a time. No two batches quite alike. Each one a distillation of weather, landscape, and mood.

Below, you will find a simple how-to for dyeing with heather.  All heathers will give you dye but the traditional one in Scotland was ling, Calluna vulgaris.

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