Harvesting Colour: poems about the experience of dyeing with plants

poetry and prose about place

Harvesting Colour: poems about the experience of dyeing with plants

In 2014, I was fortunate to receive a grant from artsNB (the New Brunswick Arts Board) for preparing a manuscript of poems on the experience of using plants as dyestuff. For a botanist and writer, this was a wonderful project. I worked all one summer gathering plant material, preparing the dyes, dyeing wool and various fabrics, and spinning the dyed wool. I produced several posts in this blog about the process ( click on https://janetims.com/?s=dyes ). Recently, my husband and I picked a basket of bright yellow tansy, and I dyed and spun eleven balls of wool. The experience inspired me to pick up my manuscript and produce a book of poems about dyeing with plants.

balls of wool I dyed with plant dyes: carrot tops (centre) and blackberry (front), and (clockwise) oak, meadowsweet, bugleweed, tansy, lily-of-the-valley, and beetroot

Now, I am almost ready to publish my manuscript. Harvesting Colour will be illustrated and have 57 poems. The book will be published early in December and available on Amazon.ca and in local bookstores.

I illustrate almost all of my books with black and white drawings. But, for a book about colour, I decided that including some of my paintings and photos in colour would be appropriate. I am so proud of my book, now in the final editing stage.

I will let you know as soon as the book is available.

All my best,

Jane