OUR COLORS | NATURAL WOOL DYES

 

It is really exciting to try a new dye with a bark, berry, flower or vegetables we just found! We use for our selected range of colors: red onion peels, white onion peels, aronia berries and dry pomegranates, all of them can be found as discarded material in Montenegro. We ‘cook’ the elements we collected for an hour, filter them and let cool down. After mordanting* the wool, we put it in the dye in small loose bundles, and slowly bring the temperature up until the color soaked in the wool. Did you know that it is a tradition for centuries in Montenegro to dye Easter eggs with onion peels? We use traditional dyeing techniques that are getting slowly getting forgotten in Montenegro. Discover below how our color magician create our colored yarns, some keep their natural colors and others get dyed naturally:

* Alum has been used since antiquity as mordant to form a permanent bond between dye and natural textile fibers like wool. It is also used in medicine as antiseptic, in food as baking powder, as deodorant (alum is also called “deodorant crystal”) and has been used since Roman times for the purification of drinking water. We used one tiny fraction of alum to mordant our wool, which is then rinsed before being dyed, then rinsed again.