Denise >

… Blue. And much to my surprise, the colour the blue Delphinium petals yielded in the dye pot was actually blue : a rather pale blue, but definitely blue!

That’s remarkable because the colour of plants – whether their petals, stems, or roots – is rarely a guide to the colour they impart to wool.  Most will give an indeterminate colour, vaguely yellow-brown-green.  But this is how the experiment turned out – with an alum mordant.

An Gàrradh Mòr : Delphiums in the west border

The Hebridean Woolshed, Isle of South Uist : Delphinium petals in dye bucket

The Hebridean Woolshed, Isle of South Uist : Cheviot wool dyed with Delphium petals over Alum mordant

Jonathan >

Denise forgot to take a photo of the delphiniums before stripping the petals, so she asked me if we had a photo from a previous year. I said I’d look, but as we have tens of thousands of photos in Google Photos, going back decades, my offer was half-hearted.  And it was just sheer blind hope when I entered ‘Delphinium’ in the search bar of Google Photos PC app. After all, our photos are stored with filenames that are simply numerical – never descriptive ; and we’ve never entered descriptive information in the file properties.  I was therefore astonished when, in less than a second, Google Photos displayed a number of photos which included either Delphinium flowers (in some cases amongst or behind other more prominent flowers), or something coloured with an appropriate shade of blue.  This photo, from 2007, was the best shot available.  I’m not sure whether I should be impressed or concerned – but probably both!