Once a year we haul the big enamel canners and a couple of camp stoves out to Betty McNealy's farm near Philomath and spend a whole Saturday turning white wool into gold and rust and brown. This year's Dye Day is Saturday, October 16, 9:00 to 4:00, rain or shine (Betty's machine shed has a roof and a wide door). Bring wool that's already mordanted (see below) or bring it washed and we'll mordant it there, plus rubber gloves, an apron, a lunch and a marker for your tags.

We stick to dyes you can grow, gather or buy at a weaving shop, and the mordants we use are the gentle ones. Natural doesn't mean harmless, though, so please read the rules first.

Mordanting with alum

A mordant helps the dye bond to the wool so the color lasts and doesn't wash out. For every pound of clean, dry wool, dissolve about an ounce and a half of alum and about an ounce of cream of tartar in a little hot water. Fill your pot with enough warm water for the wool to move freely, stir in the solution, and add the wool, already soaked so it's wet through. Bring it up slowly to just below a simmer (about 180 degrees) and hold it there for an hour. Never boil wool, and never shock it by moving it from hot to cold, or you'll have felt. Let it cool in the pot, then rinse. You can dye it right away or dry it and keep it for later.

The recipes

Black walnut hulls. Gather the green or blackening hulls in the fall (the squirrels will leave you some), cover them with water in a bucket and let them soak at least a week. Longer is better. It smells awful. Simmer the hulls an hour, strain, and dye. About equal weights of hulls and wool. Walnut is full of tannin and needs no mordant at all, so it's a good first dye. You'll get tan to deep chocolate brown, depending on how strong the bath is and how long you leave the wool in.

Onion skins. The papery outer skins of yellow onions. Save them all year in a paper sack (and ask your grocer for the loose ones in the bottom of the bin). Use about half the weight of the wool in skins. Simmer for 45 minutes, strain, and put in alum-mordanted wool. Brass, gold and rusty orange, and it's free.

Marigolds. Pick the flower heads of the ordinary French marigolds from the garden, fresh, about twice the weight of your wool (or the same weight dried). Simmer an hour, strain, and add alum-mordanted wool. A clear, strong yellow gold. Nora Suh grows a whole bed of them just for Dye Day.

Madder. The ground root of the madder plant, from a weaving shop or from your own patch if you're patient (it takes three years to grow good roots). Use half to equal the weight of the wool, and soak it overnight. Then heat it slowly and keep it below a simmer. Hot madder gives up its browns and you lose the red. A pinch of chalk helps the reds in our soft valley water. Brick, coral, orange and salmon, and every pot is a little different.

Exhaust baths. When a pot is done, put a second skein in it. And a third. Each comes out paler than the last, and you end up with a whole family of shades from one pot.

What came out of the pots: Dye Day 1998

Last year's Dye Day was Saturday, October 17, 1998. Twenty-two of us came and we dyed about fourteen pounds of wool. Here's what happened, with the cook's name for each pot.

This year Candy Drayton wants to try a pot of the Oregon grape roots from her fence line, which are supposed to give yellow. We'll let you know.