A week long immersive course in a beautiful location very close to the Thames, at Hardwick Estate in South Oxfordshire. This will be an opportunity for anyone interested in natural dyes for personal or professional use, to learn and develop skills and consolidate knowledge in the company of a small like minded group.

Natural Dyeing Course
Monday 3rd – Sunday 9th August 2026
 

Much of the course is rooted in the land here – we will be dyeing fleece from the sheep who graze the species rich chalk grassland and river meadows, using water from the well and plants from the dye garden and surrounding fields, heating the dyes outside over a wood fire. We will also use some of the best traditional dyes from warmer climates. Our approach to dyeing is not recipe based, we aim to build a holistic understanding of why plants produce dyes, how they behave and how we can harness the best colours from them. This means that we will cover a certain amount of plant physiology and chemistry. Over the years we have honed ways to make this as simple and accessible as possible and we provide course notes to support learning. During the week we will discuss questions arising and consider dyeing and textile related issues: the environmental implications, sustainability, water, ethics, time and resources.
We will hope for weather which allows most of the course to take place outdoors. However, we do have a covered but well ventilated dye house if the weather is very wet and a cosy indoor workshop space that we can retreat to if necessary. Each day we will provide an urn of hot water, some nibbles and all the necessaries for making tea, coffee and hot drinks but participants will need to bring a packed lunch.
There are various accommodation options available locally, please contact us for more information.

To express your interest, book a place on the course or to find out more please Contact Us.

We hope that running the long dyeing course as a 7 day intensive, will enable some people to come who have wanted to, but haven’t been able to commit to a series of weekends. We may return to the previous format of 4 weekends in 2027, so do let us know if that works better for you.