Know your onions!

Foraging for natural ink and dye making generally involves a great deal of outdoor activity. Long walks searching for just the right plant or tree, sewing seeds and waiting through the seasons for the time to harvest, digging for roots, scrabbling around for oak galls and acorns, the whole thing is joyous and the most pleasurable of past times. However, when it is wet and miserable you don't need to pull on those wellies for a spot of foraging, you can pop on your slippers and head into the kitchen. There are plethora of organic waste products that can be transformed into colour and this week we decided to use up our plentiful store of onion skins.

It takes no time at all to gather a lovely quantity of crisp, dry onion skins, and once boiled up they create such a rich, gorgeous yellow varying from sunshine to mustard.

No wonder people have been dyeing fabric with onion skins for so long. Easy peasy onion squeasy!