Hi Flap Jack,

I recall reading about walnuts. The husk that surrounds the shell produces a very good strong brown dye. There's a huge walnut tree growing at the camp ground I stay at when I'm in Rotorua, so next time I'm there at the right time of year I'll be picking up husks to give them a try. Berries work as well, but I just can't bring myself to waste a good feed of fresh strawberries or blueberries. Variations of yellow through orange/browns are the most common, it's going towards blue that harder to find. Woad and Indigo give a strong blue, but the dying process is quite complicated and involves ... uh ... stale urine. It apparently has no oxygen in it (which is, incidently, why you can't breath it , and that breaks down the blue dye into a water soluable form (which is green) and so it will then transport into the wool. Remove it from it's bath, and as it gets exposed to the air, the dye turns blue again. But, the dye is not very colour fast and eventually fades and washes out of the material (think blue jeans). Good pure reds are apparently hard too. There's a lot of neat lore in dyes. Purple was a royal colour because of how hard it was to make, the dye came from a shell fish of some sort. Go figure.

- Jeff