Jonathan: Recently Denise was contacted by someone wanting to knit a scarf with natural-dyed wool, sending her a swatch of upholstery fabric as a guide to colours. (I don;t know if there’s a physchological disorder in which a person obsesses about colour co-ordination, but if there is, Channel 4 would surely have made an entire reality TV series about it by now! I think we can safely assume that the weight, material and construction of the fabric were irrelevant, it was just about the colour and visual quality!) Well after a bit of chuffing about with dyed skeins in stock, Denise concluded the best thing was to try a bespoke dyeing, Tansy (on Alum mordant) for the mustardy yellow (the customer did say more mustard than the green-tinged yellow on the swatch), and Logwood (on Copper mordant) for the purple. And, here – right – is the result.  What do you think?

Denise got four dye-batches out of the session with Logwood, that on the left in the photo here being done first, and so taking up more colour than the following two batches. The fourth, used in the swatch match, used different techniques and mordant. Which do you like best?