Starting a Natural Dye Garden

Learn which plants you can grow in your own garden to use for creating natural dyes and natural pigments.

This class will focus on dye plants appropriate for the Pacific Northwest, including madder, goldenrod, marigold, coreopsis, Japanese indigo, and more. We'll discuss the different types of dye gardens you can create, like container gardens, how to integrate dye plants into an existing garden, etc. During class, each student will plan out their own dye garden and create a planting schedule. We'll have a chance to look at dye swatches of different plants and students will create a swatch page so they can remember which colors they can expect to yield. You'll also leave class with some seeds to go home and plant!

This class is taught by AAC staff member and natural dyer, Katey Rissi .

This class is part of our Art + Agriculture Series. Art + Agriculture classes explore the connections between art, agriculture, and ecology and the ways that these connections build a sense of place. Check out more from this series here.

Registration: Please register early if you are able, as it helps us to assure that classes meet their minimums in order to run! If you register more than three weeks before this class begins, a 20% early bird discount will automatically be applied to your ticket at checkout.

A Note on Ticket Pricing: We are experimenting with offering sliding scale tickets in order to keep our classes accessible to as many community members as possible. There are three price tiers. Sustaining tickets help us continue to invest in programming. Full price tickets cover the costs associated with running classes. Accessibility tickets are priced below what it costs for us to run a class. If the cost of a full price ticket is a hardship, we encourage you to purchase a sliding scale ticket. If you can pay the full price or sustaining price, please choose that option so we can keep providing arts programming to the community.

Tuition Assistance: Tuition assistance is available for Alchemy classes and workshops if finances are a barrier. Apply for tuition assistance here.

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