Preparing to Make the Dye Bath

 

In order to dye our cloth this Saturday we will need a dye bath to soak our cloth in.  In fact, we will need to heat up the dye bath and soak the cloth in it for about an hour.   This means we Teacher Candidates will have to make the dye bath prior to the workshop on Saturday. 

We originally wanted the participants to make the dye on at the workshop.  The dye is actually quite easy to make.  First, you pick a lot of butter cups – which would be easy since there are like a million of them in the orchard garden – then you cook the flowers in water. Voila! You have a yellow dye bath.  The problem is, you must cook the buttercups in water for up to 90 minutes.  After discussing, we realized that if we attempted to make the dye on Saturday, we would runout of time to dye the cloth.   We decided that for Saturday’s workshop we will still show our participants how to make the dye, but we will have a batch of premade dye so that we can skip the 90-minute wait. 

Tomorrow we will make the premade dye bath at the orchard.  Today I picked up some propane for a Coleman stove that we can use on site at the garden.  I also grabbed a butane stove and butane cartridges as a back up.   The team of teacher candidates are meeting tomorrow for our first attempt at making dye from butter cups and water.