The vats
Four baths, kept alive, for as long as we can keep them
We dye with plants, in vats that are years old, on wool and linen. Four colours only — not as a position, but because a living vat needs feeding every week and four is what four people can feed.
Weld — the oldest yellow in Europe
Reseda luteola, grown two fields away and cut before it seeds. It gives a yellow that is clean rather than warm, and it is the base for every green we make. It is also the least stable of the four, so weld goods leave with a note saying to keep them out of a south window.
Woad — the same blue as indigo, grown here
Chemically the same dye; agriculturally a different proposition. Woad yields perhaps a thirtieth of the pigment per acre, which is why it lost, and it gives a blue with a grey in it that imported indigo does not. Our vat has been fermenting since 2019.
Madder — three years in the ground for one afternoon
The root is lifted in its third autumn, dried, and ground. Held under seventy degrees it gives red; let it boil and it turns brick and stays there. More madder has been ruined by impatience in the last hour than by anything else in the whole process.
Walnut — a brown that needs nothing to hold it
Green husks, gathered in September from trees we do not own and have permission for. Walnut is substantive: it fixes to the fibre without a mordant, which makes it the one colour here that a beginner can get right first time.
Why only four
A vat is a thing you keep rather than a thing you make. Ours are fed weekly, sometimes badly, and the season shows in the cloth — which is the argument for this way of working and also the reason we cannot promise you an exact match.