By Amanda Cinco-Hoyt

"The story within any natural dye can take you to a place in time, a history lesson of warriors, of antiquity, or harken to your favorite local hiking trail. The Crazy Wisdom journal story highlighting our organization, Color Wheel, ends on a note that makes for a great starting point for this blog:

"Foraging for native plants [for dye] tells the story of where we live. " Michelle McCoskey

Plants tell the story of place and conditions, and most of us can bring forth a favorite memory through that connection.

To some, it is the arrival of a certain bright red berry. For others, it may be a beautiful blossom to look forward to every spring, or perhaps a sea of golden leaves beckoning to be waded through while walking around a familiar neighborhood. To a natural dyer, the sensation and story line that a certain plant contains creates a whole new dimension. Be it the color that specific plant offers on cloth, when that plant is most full of color, or the optional time for harvest. Sometimes even an olfactory memory is signaled, causing goldenrod's lemony sweet scent to rush forward.

In a recent post on our instagram account @colorwheelmichigan, Michelle highlights a skein of wool that was grown and milled within our Great Lakes Fibershed region, purchased from Bridget Kavanaugh, a wool farmer of Happy Goat Lucky Ewe farm and member of the Michigan Fiber Cooperative, an organization that combines the efforts of multiple wool growers in the region. The skein was then dyed by Michelle of Color Wheel with a mix of collected native flowers, leaves, and acorns gathered from her favorite place. This golden yellow is a fingerprint of the color we are surrounded by in our Great Lakes state. Actually, yellows of all various shades are abundant in our state. Learning this through exploration was one of the main instigators in us creating Color Wheel.

Having the opportunity to grow colors locally that would otherwise only be available via the internet allows us a greater rainbow of local hues and a wider palette to include in our Fibershed collections. It also offers the hands-on opportunity to connect with the plant and stimulate the folk pathway of shared knowledge with the history that plant has to offer. Applying locally foraged or grown color to local fibers, grown and processed in our region, was a main goal we had and reached this year. Through Color Wheel, we are able to grow colors that do not grow as abundantly in nature, especially in our mild, temperate climate, such as red from Madder root and blue from Japanese Indigo and Woad.

According to webexhibits.org, "Madder has been cultivated as a dyestuff since antiquity in central Asia, where it was grown as early as 1500 B.C. Cloth dyed with madder root pigment was found in the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun and in the ruins of Pompeii and ancient Corinth." With a history as rich as madder, one can't ignore the vivid imagination that stirs while carefully digging up homegrown roots that started from seed and take three years to reach maturity and finally offer the substantive dye for which this plant is known. [http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/indiv/history/madder.html]

As for blues, nature has very few to offer by way of substantive color and lightfast dye.

Japanese indigo and Woad both contain indigotin, an insoluble blue chemical that is the endpoint of indigo dye. Japanese Indigo contains a much higher quantity of indigotin, which eventually eliminated the Woad industry in Europe once trade routes to India were discovered in the late 15th century. Japanese Indigo is one of our favorite dyes to work with, and just as the other dyes, holds its own distinctive smell; an earthy smell, that signals that the living vat is healthy.

For us, Japanese indigo, this thousands-of-years-old dye, reminds us samurai warriors, of planting the first seeds we grew in 2015 with a lot of hope, millions of happy pink flowers dangling for bees in the summer, harvesting and separating leaf from stem with a community of people eager to meet the result, "Ooohs" and "Aaahs" as the indigo fabric takes its "first breath" and begins oxidizing, bringing forth its incredible natural hue, and harvesting seeds in the fall to prepare and begin the entire cycle of growing and dyeing again in the spring."