Natural Dyeing - A Golden Colour

Some time back I dyed a 100g skein of lace weight yarn using eucalyptus leaves of an unknown species (I found some windfall on the road while out for a walk, and there were many eucalypts nearby.)

The resulting colour was pleasant enough but a little insipid to use as a whole skein. But it presented an opportunity to over dye it with another natural dyestuff.

As one of the gums on our own property was shedding its bark I was able to collect 100g of inner bark without doing any damage to the tree. After appropriate soaking and heating, over dyeing produced a very special, and no doubt irreplaceable, golden colour!! I did keep a very close eye on the dye pot as I didn’t want to “swamp” the original colour overmuch.