Adventures in natural dye
About a year ago I took a class on natural dyes. The picture above are my first year’s worth of experiments. I’d been taking lots of walks with the family during lockdown so was primed to start foraging. All I needed was a pot and I found one at a flea market so I was ready to start.
Dyeing is slow. And unpredictable. You never know what you’re going to find and there’s no guarantee how the yarn will turn out. But it’s also fun and amazing to see what colors show up, how affecting the pH of the dye will affect the color or how adding a modifier like iron will change things.
I had my own “happy little accident” when I accidentally dyed my nails purple. Now, what does this have to do with writing. Well, everything. Authors are artists, creating worlds and characters with their words. And sometimes things don’t work out the way we hoped, a plot hole gapes or the middle sags. All a writer can do is fix it and move forward. You can’t undo the past but you can control what’s going to happen next and to keep moving forward. Sometimes that means the story changes, sometimes it means you shelf a project and move on to greener pastures stronger from what you learned from the previous project, and sometimes that means you just keep going, working away until it is just right.
And sometimes you rock your purple nails like you meant to dye them, embracing your happy little accident!
