🔴 Red Wool In The Pot
Eastern Woodlands Honor Blanket

Workshop Description:
Red Wool In A Pot is a full-day, immersive online workshop that invites participants to engage in the sacred and healing practice of dyeing wool cloth with madder root—a deep, earthy red plant dye historically revered across many cultures. In this session, we center Southeastern Woodlands Indigenous traditions and honor the lives of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (#MMIW) through the creation of red-dyed wool for use in a commemorative blanket or cloth.

Guided by Indigenous ways of knowing, participants will learn how to work with madder as land medicine, respecting the plant, understanding its growing cycle, and unlocking its powerful red hues through mindful preparation and dyeing. This workshop is hands-on and ceremonial, designed not only to teach technique but also to offer a space for reflection, remembrance, and reconnection to ancestral textile practices.

We will explore how red has long been a color of protection, visibility, and spiritual power, and how the act of creating with it becomes an offering, a prayer, and a statement of survival. The dyed cloth will serve as a foundation for participants to begin or contribute to an Indigenous Southeastern Woodlands wool honor blanket, honoring traditions of community, storytelling, and protection through textile art.

✿ What You'll Learn

• History and cultural significance of madder root in Indigenous and global traditions

• How to prepare wool cloth for dyeing (scouring and mordanting)

• Step-by-step madder dye extraction and dye bath techniques

• Modifying and deepening madder reds using pH and mineral shifts

• Ethical sourcing of madder root dye

• Honoring #MMIW through color, cloth, and community remembrance

• Ideas for incorporating dyed wool into a Southeastern Woodlands blanket design

📦 What You’ll Need (Materials List will be sent upon registration):

• Wool cloth (instructions on how to prepare for dyeing provided in advance, and demonstrated live)

• Sources to purchase wool will be provided upon registration

• Alum mordant 

• Madder root (whole, chopped, or powder)

• Tums Antacid

• Stainless steel or non-reactive dye pot

• Stirring tool, heat source, and access to water

• Optional: pH modifiers (e.g., vinegar, baking soda, iron water)
  
  

Participants may choose to watch and learn or dye along from home.

🔗 Registration:

Registrations Opens Sunday, July 20, 2025

Only ten (10) spaces are available to maintain an intimate learning experience.