As 2024 comes to a close, we like to reflect on all we’re thankful for. We are grateful for you, dear reader, as your support keeps us exploring ideas and sharing content that we hope will motivate you to keep growing, learning, doing.
As a thank you to the wonderful Spin Off community, we’ve selected one of our special eBook collections and made it free to everyone through January 15, 2025.
You can find the free eBook, Natural Dye Series: Easy Peasy Natural Dyeing, in the Spin Off Library. All you need to do is create a free account if you haven’t done so already. (If you’re a magazine or All Access subscriber to Spin Off, you’ll have access to even more goodies!)
Onions, members of the lily family, yield glorious color. Photo by Matt Graves
There are so many reasons that we might hesitate to plunge into natural dyeing. Sometimes we just don’t have the resources—time, brain space, budget, or all three—to devote to a craft that can have a steep learning curve. Or perhaps you are worried about “ruining” good fiber and ending up with a pile of beige skeins.
These are all very real concerns, and we hope we can help smooth your path. Three experienced natural dyers offer some easy ways to get started. Natural Dye Series: Easy Peasy Natural Dyeing includes:
- “An Ode to Onion Skins: Modifying a Humble Dyestuff,” where Madeline Keller-King shows you how to use common grocery items like onion skins, alum, and vinegar.
- “Naturally Beautiful Together: Unite Your Stash with Natural Overdyes,” where Dagmar Klos encourages you to dip into your stash yarns to create a cohesive palette by overdyeing with tea, black walnuts, and marigolds.
- “One-Pot Magic: Surprising Natural-Dye Rainbows,” where Martha Owen shares her “magic pot” method of combining multiple dyestuffs for a fun, multicolor effect.
With a variegated dyepot, card multiple locks together for slow transitions of color, or flick card and spin lock by lock for shorter sparks of color in your handspun skeins. Photo by Matt Graves
This ebook is only free for a limited time, so get your copy today. Visit the Spin Off library to get your free copy of Natural Dye Series: Easy Peasy Natural Dyeing. We hope you find time to spin and be creative as you wind down this year and forge ahead into the next, and we hope this collection of natural dyeing articles inspires you to do just that.