This summer, the Sewing Seeds team has been busy harvesting, extracting and natural dyeing with plants from the Old Stone House here in Brooklyn. In the process we developed a Natural Dye Swatch Book for the gardens resource as well as for our own personal library. The Old Stone House has such a beautiful and plentiful garden, and we were honored to have worked with them for these past few months.
For the swatch book, we wanted to have a variety of colors so we worked with many different types of flowers, berries and plants to achieve a harmonious color palate. We harvested Yarrow, Plantain, Sage, Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia), Chokeberry, Elderberry, Amaranth, Tansy, False Indigo, Cosmo, and Coreopsis - all from the Old Stone House gardens. We also achieved different colors within the plants by using different mordants as well as dyeing both cotton and silk swatches.
We hope to continue our relationship with Old Stone House and keep adding to the resource... Onto the fall harvest!