News

At the begining of 2022, I started the Maiwa School of Textiles "The Natural Dye Workshop". This online course, which was broken into ten modules with one released per week, seemed like an amazing though challenging opportunity to learn more about plant dyeing. Having started on my plant-using journey when I trained as a medical herbalist like my great grandfather, it seemed like the natural companion to other courses I'd taken over the years with, for example, Jules of Woollenflower and Flora of Plants & Colour. One of the most important things that the course emphasises is to keep good records. Yes, please! I...

Our last online shop of 2022 will be on Friday 18th November at 8pm (Edinburgh time). This early date will hopefully mean that your shopping will be delivered before the Christmas holidays. This will also be the last chance to buy a Woolly bag before March 2023 as there are some exciting changes going on behind the scenes at Woolly Originals! More on that later on in November. And to make things a wee bit more exciting, we'll only be offering pre-wrapped Christmas Crackers which will each contain a mystery Woolly bag, a ball of wool to compliment the outer or inner fabric of your...

I recently realised that I had now designed and made quite a number of one-off larger bags, each inspired by a painting either by Joan Eardley or FCB Cadell. I thought it would be interesting to gather together photos of some of these bags in one place! The base fabric of each bag has been individually designed according to the painting though adapted for the size of a larger bag; and then machine knit using either Jamieson's of Shetland Spindrift yarn or Iona Wool weaving yarn. Buttons, ribbons, upcycled fabrics, other brand yarns, embroidery and crochet techniques have been used post-blocking to create an...

I'm delighted to be taking part in the Maiwa School of Textiles 10-week online dyeing workshop! This incredibly well-supported course takes you through dyeing with wool, silk, cotton, linen and hemp using a variety of natural dyes. Although I have been studying and practising using plant dyes since 2018, I thought this course was too good to miss.  And I was right!  Already we have learnt how Maiwa scour and mordant both protein and cellulose fibres, and also how to organise your studio. Here are a few pictures from the first dye bathes, namely marigold and madder on the right on...