Dye-hard Woods Bay spinner uses beetles and lichen to naturally color fibers

Joan Goldstein is the first to admit it took her a long time to get over the fear of dyeing.

Now, any day is a good day to dye.

Goldstein, of Woods Bay Point near Bigfork, is somewhat of a purist in her pursuit of coloring fibers. She just planted her first batch of indigo seeds with the hope she'll one day have vats of blue dye colored with her own indigo plants.

One of her favorite dyes comes from Cochineal bugs that grow only on the prickly pear cactus in Mexico, Central and South America. Actually, its only the female Cochineal that contains carminic acid, the coloring agent that produces brilliant scarlet reds.

She gathers moss-colored lichen when she's out hiking, and uses it to produce several shades of green yarn.

"It's like making scalloped potatoes. You just layer the lichen in with the yarn," Goldstein explained.

When it's done soaking, the lichen shakes off easily enough, she added.

Goldstein first delved into dyeing nine years ago for a practical reason. She was spinning a lot of yarn and needed to do something with it.

"It wasn't instant success," she confided about her early attempts at dyeing.

Proceed with caution is advice that's been learned the hard way. One time, a tiny hole in a bag of blue powdered dye was enough to cause an amount of dye to be airborne as she mixed it with water.

"I coated the whole kitchen in blue dye," she recalled. "It took three scrubbings to get rid of it."

Since she uses some chemicals along with her natural dyes, she wears a protective mask.

There's a lot of experimentation that goes into dyeing. If a batch of yarn is too bright, dipping it into tea can subdue the colors. Tea itself produces a wonderful shade of tan, Goldstein said; coffee gives wool a more yellow shade of tan.

Berries generally don't hold color well, she noted, but she has used raspberries on occasion. Mushrooms can be used, too, though Goldstein said she hasn't been that pleased with the results of coloring fibers with mushroom dye.

Marigolds, on the other hand, can create some spectacular shades of yellow. Goldstein uses copper sulfate to vary the hues. Alum and tin are other mordants, or pure concentrated chemicals, she commonly uses.

Kool-Aid and Easter-egg dye can also be used to color fibers, she said.

Goldstein uses a syringe to manually apply coloring to create variegated yarn.

"Wool, mohair and silk all dye really well," she advised. "alpaca and llama [fibers] are less consistent."

Dying has a colorful history. Cochineal bugs were used as early as the 1500s. Madder, a dye that uses roots to produce red tones, was historically used in India and later, Turkey, to make colorfast "Turkey red" by employing about 20 separate processes using blood, oil, rancid fat, charcoal, cow and sheep dung, and the liquid contents of animals' stomachs.

That much of a purist Goldstein isn't.

The art of coloring is only a hobby, she said - dabbling in it is fun. Friends come over for dyeing parties, and like any good potluck, they bring a dye pot.

"I just found a flow chart where you take 24 different skeins and you should end up with 24 different shades from one dye pot," Goldstein said.

Nuggets of valuable information are gleaned from each dyeing session, and she's compiled a manual, complete with color samples, to more easily share the technology of coloring fibers.

Goldstein was drawn to wool fiber at an early age. She started knitting in the sixth grade and now designs patterns for hats and other clothing items.

"The first time I ever saw hand-spinning done was in 1974, and I signed up [for classes] on the spot," she said. "I've always been fascinated by the process."

Raising a family and a career as a speech pathologist took precedence for many years. For the entire nine years she lived in Alaska in the 1980s and early '90s, her spinning wheel and loom went untouched.

When the Goldsteins later moved to Helena (her hometown), she found an enthusiastic group of spinners and picked up where she left off.

Retirement last June afforded the long-awaited time to take up dyeing. Classes from world-renowned fiber artist Judith MacKenzie-McCuin helped jump-start her new hobby.

When Goldstein and her husband, Harvey, moved to Woods Bay, they ended up buying a fully furnished house. The double set of appliances came in handy as she made plans to create a dye lab in the garage.

The covenants of their property prevent her from conducting classes in her home, but Goldstein is happy to share advice and often teaches classes in color techniques in other people's homes.

She spends a fair amount of time spinning and knitting. It's a passion, she said, not a get-rich-quick scheme.

"For the kinds of things I do, I wouldn't make a lot of money at this," she said.