Neutrals don’t get nearly enough credit. In a world of saturated colour, the quieter shades — warm greys, soft browns, the whole range between black and not-quite-black — are often what give a piece of textile work its depth and complexity. They’re the colours that make everything else sing.
The good news is that neutrals are not a single thing. Black is not just black — it can lean warm or cool, pull toward violet or green, and behave completely differently depending on what it’s sitting next to. The same is true of grey and brown. Once you start mixing and layering these shades, you begin to see just how much variation is possible, and how much creative range opens up when you understand what you’re working with. In this workshop, we explore all of that through your hands and your cloth.
$90CDN
The heart of this workshop is building a personal collection of neutral samples that you’ll actually use. We start with black dyes — exploring the range of values they produce and the surprising differences between them — then move into mixing our own blacks and neutrals from primary combinations, both warm and cool.
- Explore a wide range of neutral values using black, grey, and brown dyes
- Mix your own blacks and neutrals from primary colour combinations
- Discover the warm and cool colour casts within different blacks
- Work with low water immersion, shibori, and pole wrapping techniques
- Print with thickened dyes and add deeper values to previously dyed fabrics
- Over-dye existing colours with neutrals to create subtle shifts and variations
- Build a personal dyeing sample book as a lasting reference
- Create small yardages to add to your fabric inventory
Each lesson contains video content, Tips and Hints PDF, dye charts and more.
Remember you have Life Time Access to all content!
The colour mixes we cover together are really just the beginning — there are so many more combinations waiting to be discovered, and I hope you’ll keep experimenting well beyond the workshop. Try mixing both warm and cool primaries, see what happens when you layer neutrals over colours you already have, or add another dimension with screen printing or stamping on top. And don’t feel you need to do everything at once — follow what interests you. I’d love to see where you take it, so please share your results!
$90CDN
