I went to a natural dyeing workshop on Saturday with @judypreston403 and came away feeling quietly undone, in the best possible way.
Until then, I hadn’t realised how narrow my assumptions about natural dyeing had been. I think I’d absorbed the idea that plant-based colour was inherently limited: a restrained palette of earthy browns, muted yellows, and soft greens. That impression probably comes from the way we’re so often shown the past in films and illustrations where everyday people are dressed in various shades of mud, as though colour itself were scarce or reserved for special occasions.
Spending the day working with plant dyes gently unsettled that idea. Colour hasn’t just always been present; it has been abundant, varied, and surprisingly vibrant. By the end of the workshop, my understanding of colour, and where it comes from, had shifted in a way that felt both grounding and quietly expansive. It wasn’t overwhelming or dramatic, just a sense of being re-oriented, as though something I already half-knew had finally been given proper shape.
The Generosity of Plants
Most natural dyes do begin in a familiar place: yellows and greens derived from leaves, flowers, bark. There’s a logic to that. Chlorophyll, sunlight, growth. These colours feel inherently grounded, and when you see them building up in layers on cloth, it makes complete sense. But then there are the surprises.
Rich pinks and purples coaxed out of blackberries and hibiscus. Deep, almost jewel-like tones that feel far removed from the hedgerow. It’s one thing to read that plants can produce these colours; it’s another to witness it happening in front of you. Watching fabric change in the dye bath felt almost alchemical - not in a mystical way, but in a deeply practical one. This is what happens when knowledge meets attention.
What struck me most was how accessible it all felt. These weren’t exotic ingredients shipped halfway around the world. These were plants you might walk past every day. Things you could gather on a dog walk. Things you could grow in a small garden.
Colour, it turns out, isn’t scarce, it’s just been outsourced.
Slowing Down Enough to Notice
Natural dyeing asks something very particular of you. It doesn’t reward rushing. You have to wait. Observe. Adjust. Pay attention to temperature, timing, fibre, water. It’s process-heavy in the best possible way.
That felt oddly familiar because in sewing, especially in fitting and pattern cutting, the same rules apply. The moment you try to hurry, things start to unravel. Fabric tells you what it needs, but only if you’re prepared to listen. Natural dyeing felt like another version of that same conversation, just happening earlier in the making process.
There’s also a humility to it. You don’t fully control the outcome. You influence it, guide it, but you don’t dominate it. The colour that emerges is a collaboration between plant, fibre, water, and hand. It's a quiet negotiation rather than an act of command. That feels important. It stands in contrast to a much more dominant way of thinking that has shaped modern society, where nature is treated as something to be controlled, extracted from, or bent to human will.
Natural dyeing asks for a different posture altogether, one that acknowledges limits, seasons, and reciprocity. As a species, we’re slowly being forced to recognise that we can’t keep taking without consequence, that dominion without care is ultimately destructive. Working with plants in this way makes that reality tangible. You’re reminded that what you receive depends on what you give back, and that making can be an act of relationship rather than ownership.
Bringing Dyeing Back Into Domestic Making
What I keep coming back to is how normal this once was. Spinning, weaving, dyeing these weren’t niche crafts or specialist hobbies. They were domestic skills. Everyone did them, because everyone needed clothes, blankets, sacks, sails. Colour wasn’t something you bought off a shelf; it was something you made.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the context of my MA, and about how making has slowly been extracted from the home and professionalised, industrialised, and globalised. In that process, we’ve lost not just skills, but a way of relating to materials. At the same time, I’m very aware that we live with entirely different time constraints now. Women’s roles have shifted - often expanded - and the rhythms of contemporary life don’t easily allow for the kind of time these practices once demanded. For many people, there simply isn’t the space or energy to devote hours to spinning, weaving, or dyeing alongside work, caring, and everything else that fills modern days.
Perhaps that’s what makes natural dyeing feel like such a small but potent act of resistance. It doesn’t require a factory. It doesn’t even require much space. A pot, some heat, plant matter, cloth. Knowledge, passed on. Time allowed - even if only in fragments. It offers a way back in that acknowledges the realities of now, rather than pretending we can return wholesale to the past.
Ancient Textiles
Recently, I watched a programme about a Bronze Age settlement that had been uncovered and preserved in astonishing detail, including textiles.
Britain’s Pompeii: A Village Lost In Time - available on iplayer.
What struck the archaeologists most was how fine those textiles were. Not crude or rough, as we so often imagine, but sophisticated. Deliberate. Skilled. That revelation has stayed with me and begs the question: How much knowledge and lived experience have we actually lost over the millennia?
We tend to assume that technological progress moves in a straight line with forward momentum, that older always means simpler and somehow ‘less’. But time and again, archaeology shows us otherwise. Skills were lost, not gradually improved. Knowledge was embedded in daily life, not locked away in institutions or factories.
Those Bronze Age textiles may not have been made by “experts” in the modern sense. They were made by people who learned by doing, from childhood, within a community where making was ordinary.
Natural dyeing sits squarely in that lineage.
Remembering My Grandparents’ Generation
I can’t help but connect this to my own family history. In my grandparents’ generation, everyone knitted. It wasn’t remarkable. It was just what you did. Men and women alike. Several of my great uncles could knit perfectly well; socks, jumpers, practical garments made to last. Making wasn’t framed as creative self-expression. It was competence, care and continuity.
Somewhere along the line, we lost that ease. Skills became optional, then specialist, then obscure. Now we treat them as lifestyle choices rather than life skills.
Natural dyeing, just like sewing, gently pushes back against that loss. It reminds us that these skills were never meant to be exceptional or exclusive. They belong in ordinary lives, held lightly, practiced imperfectly, and passed on without ceremony.
Colour as Part of a Personal Wardrobe
What excites me most is how this might feed into my own clothes making.
I don’t have ambitions to dye everything I wear, that would miss the point. But the idea of integrating naturally dyed elements feels powerful. Working with natural fibres including details that carry a story beyond the garment itself.
With this colour becomes contextual, seasonal and more importantly I think -local. A reflection of place and time rather than trend forecasts where we can only access what others have told us we are allowed to wear.
There’s also something deeply satisfying about wearing colour that hasn’t been chemically forced into existence. There is a softness, a depth to it. Colour that has emerged slowly, with care feels calmer somehow. More grounded. There is even research into natural dyes that can have medicinal or antibacterial qualities to them. Something I want to explore further.
Learning, Not Mastery
One thing the workshop reinforced is that this is a lifelong learning process. Natural dyeing isn’t something you “complete”. There are variables you can’t eliminate. Plants change year to year. Water ph levels change from place to place. Fibres behave differently.
That, again, feels familiar. In teaching sewing, I’m always reminding people that the goal isn’t perfection - it’s understanding. Once you understand what’s happening, you can make informed choices. You can adapt. You can recover.
Natural dyeing fits beautifully into that philosophy. It rewards curiosity far more than certainty.
Making as Cultural Memory
Perhaps what moved me most was the sense of continuity. When you dye cloth with plants, you are participating in a practice that stretches back thousands of years. Not as reenactment or nostalgia, but as lived, embodied knowledge. The actions themselves are simple and recognisable: hands in warm water, cloth slowly absorbing colour, the steady passage of time marked not by a clock but by observation and attention. These gestures link you to countless others who have done the same, not as a statement, but because it was how colour entered their lives.
In a world where so much of what we use and wear is abstracted - produced far away, by processes we rarely see or understand - that kind of immediacy feels quietly radical. Natural dyeing collapses distance. It makes cause and effect visible again. You see where colour comes from, what it asks of you, and what it leaves behind. There’s a clarity in that exchange that modern systems often obscure.
This isn’t about rejecting modernity or romanticising the past. I’m grateful for the tools, technologies, and freedoms we have now. But experiences like this are a reminder that progress doesn’t have to mean disconnection from materials, from place, or from one another.
Some forms of knowledge don’t become obsolete; they simply wait, ready to be picked up again, adapted, and carried forward in ways that make sense for the lives we’re living now.
A Thread I Want to Follow
I left the workshop feeling full of questions rather than answers, and that feels exactly right.
How might natural dyeing sit alongside sewing education? What does it mean to bring colour-making back into the domestic sphere? How do these practices support slower, more thoughtful relationships with clothing?
These are questions I want to keep pulling on in my own making, in my teaching, and in my MA work.
Saturday wasn’t just a workshop. It was a reminder that much of what we need is already around us, waiting patiently. We just have to slow down enough to notice.
Jules x