Painted Warp with Natural Dyes
- Sara Goodman

Have you even wanted to dye some yarn, but you were worried about the heavy metals in chemical dyes? It is now possible to get a full palette of colors from substances derived from nature: yellows from woods and leaves, red from roots and insects, blues from fermented leaves, and browns and purples from trees. These dyes are safe to use and the colors glow with the soul of the plants they are made from. This class will cover the essentials of fiber preparation: scouring and mordanting; dye preparation: making stock solutions and making an indigo vat; painting and heat setting. Using concentrated natural dye extracts from Earthues, weavers will paint a scarf length wool warp and enough weft yarn for weaving it off. Knitters will paint some skeins for variegated yarn, and immersion dye some others. As a result, students will learn the basic processes for painting with thickened dyes and immersion dyeing.

SARA GOODMAN is a textile artist with a studio/school, House of Dreams, in Lyme, NH. Her work has been featured in Handwoven and Shuttle Spindle and Dyepot, and the fashion show at Convergence. Her one-of-a-kind garments have won awards from Complex Weavers and the New England Weavers Seminar. Sara's work can be seen at Julie's Artisans Gallery in NY and the League of NH Craftsmen. As a board member of the Rugmark Foundation, an organization dedicated to elimination of child labor from the handmade carpet industry in south Asia, and an active member of Warp, Weave a Real Peace, Sara is deeply committed to improving the social and economic conditions for weavers in developing countries. She has had a lifelong interest in Indonesian textiles, ikat, and natural dyes. Recently she traveled to Guatemala to teach sectional warping to women in the Mayan Hands Weaving Cooperative.