Natural Dyeing - Linen

Linen is supposed to be difficult to dye and then it is supposed to only take very pale colours. I've also read that you need to do an alum/tanin/alum mordant procedure to get the pale colours to stay on linen. I present to you the results of the madder, woad and weld dye vats on linen. The linen was mordanted with alum. We were pretty overwhelmed with the fantastic and totally unexpected results. I haven't redone this experiment to see if it was a fluke or the real deal. It does however give some credence to recreating the findings of early period blue and red dyed linens. I was thrilled to bits with this particular experiment.