Natural dyeing – Wood Ash Lye modifier

testing the pH of my wood ash lye – about a 12

In all of the natural dyeing I’ve been doing (or hoping to do!) in the last little while, I read a little about using wood ash as a dye modifier. In Rebecca Burgess’ Harvesting Colour: How to find plants and make natural dyes, she notes that wood ash can be used interchangeably with soda ash to create an alkali after bath. In reading about fermentation dyeing, wood ash lye also came up, and further it came up in my experiment with my first woad harvest.