What’s Included
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A complete plant dye kit which includes everything you need for the course, plus extra materials to experiment with at home.
The kit includes;
a collection of natural fabrics
mordants, assists and modifiers
plant dyes
seeds
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One home visit with both instructors for further guidance in your overall site plan. This could include addressing permaculture specific questions and/or how to optimize creative workflow in your home.
*note, outside of a 10 mile radius of Bozeman, there will be an additional travel fee.
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Both instructors will be present for every session and will provide experiential learning in the following areas:
permaculture principles and growing instructions for your home garden
ethical wild harvesting
foundation of natural dyes— an in-depth study of the relationship between fiber, plant, and mordant
multiple design techniques, including bundle dyeing, eco printing, and creating prints and patterns with direct application of the dyes
making your own pigments for painting using exhausted dye baths
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Detailed written instructions to accompany each session, organized in a binder to keep for your records
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Meet your local flower farmers! We are thrilled to partner with Kokoro Farm this year. Not only will they be hosting us for the duration of the course, but they will also provide opportunities outside the scheduled lessons to learn about organic farming and how to grow on a larger scale.
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Tour the Broken Ground Homestead and learn how Kareen and her community have turned their urban lot into a fully sustainable food forest.
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Our July session will be held at Mariah’s studio outside Bozeman. Get inspired by Mariah’s studio and learn how she incorporates both wild and homegrown flowers into her natural dye practice.
“Local Color is a unique and thoughtfully curated course for anyone who wants to dig into their relationship with place, plants, art, and community. It has changed the way I see the world around me and my approach to gardening and fiberarts. ”
Schedule and Itinerary
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Location: Kokoro Farm
This class covers the principles of permaculture and how to plan for maximum connectivity within the context of nature-craft and gardening.
This class includes:
Site planning
Seed selection
Step-by-step guide to starting your own dye garden
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Location: Kokoro Farm
Use this opportunity to learn the ins and outs of running an organic farm from seed to harvest
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Location: Kokoro Farm
This class will expand on permaculture design and how to prepare your soil for planting.
This class includes:
Soil building and health
Water capture
Designing your own site plan
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Use this opportunity to learn the ins and outs of running an organic farm from seed to harvest
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During the month of June Mariah and Kareen will schedule a home visit with each participant. This is an opportunity to ask specific questions about your overall site plan, including permaculture questions and how to optimize creative workflow in your home.
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Location: Broken Ground Homestead
Tour the Broken Ground Homestead and learn how Kareen and her community turned their urban lot into a fully sustainable food forest.
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Location: Local Earth Studio
In this class we will gather to forage St. John's wort and discuss the benefits of working with invasive plants as well as how to forage ethically. We will use the plants we have foraged to demonstrate immersion dyeing. This part will cover the foundations of natural dyeing, including mordants, fiber types and what makes a plant a dye plant.
This class covers the following:
Ethical foraging and working with invasive dye plants
The foundation of natural dyeing, including mordants and fiber types
What makes a plant a dye plant
How to create an immersion dye bath using plants that we have foraged locally
How to achieve a range of colors from just one plant
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Location: Kokoro Farm
Use this opportunity to learn the ins and outs of running an organic farm from seed to harvest
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Location: Kokoro Farm
This will cover the following design techniques:
How to create prints and patterns using the direct application of dyes
How to eco print using fresh flowers
How to bundle dye using fresh and/or dried flowers
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Location: Kokoro Flower Farm
In this class, we will learn how to use our exhausted dye baths to create an insoluble pigment for use in painting.
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Location: Kokoro Farm
This class will cover:
How to save and store seeds
How to prep your garden for winter
“This program was an incredibly meaningful part of my creative process + education as a gardener. We created a meaningful community, learned fabulous skills to explore the alchemy of dye plants, and had a beautiful opportunity to connect with a remembering in our ancestry that held this knowledge long ago.”
Kareen and Mariah during our 2025 season
About the Instructors
Mariah is a textile artist and designer with an endless fascination for natural dyes. She works with local and homegrown plants she grows or forages and especially loves working with invasive plants. In her latest endeavor, she co-founded Wilder Goods — a shop and art gallery in the Emerson Center for Arts and Culture. In that space, she began offering workshops, which sparked a move away from retail and into teaching and hosting workshops rooted in connecting with the land. She now teaches and creates under the name Local Earth in her home studio outside Bozeman. Over the past decade, she has pieced together the school of her dreams by attending workshops that centered around nature and art, including a Master Naturalist certification through the Montana Outdoor Science School, Resilient Homestead, a permaculture course with Broken Ground–as well as various dye courses, including; ‘The Poetics of Pigment’ with the Wild Pigment Project, Screen Printing with Natural Dyes in Brooklyn at the Textile Arts Center, Printing with Natural Dyes with the Maiwa School of Textiles and The Chemistry of Natural Dyes, also with the Maiwa School of Textiles. She lives and works outside Bozeman with her husband, 12-year-old daughter, and animals, both domestic and wild.
Kareen, owner of Broken Ground, is a garden design consultant, homesteader, and educator. For over a decade, she has helped thousands of people in cold climates grow their own food through consultations, design services, her signature Resilient Homestead Program, and her YouTube channel. In addition to being a Master Gardener and Master Composter, Kareen is certified in permaculture design, a whole-systems approach to land management and sustainable living. She is on the faculty of the Permaculture Women’s Guild, Green Path Herb School, and the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute. Kareen lives with her husband on a suburban homestead in Bozeman, Montana, with a greenhouse, pond, vegetable gardens, a food forest of fruit trees and berry bushes, a flock of chickens, and her blue heeler dog Beni.
Meara, one of the owners of Kokoro farm and our host for 2026!
About Kokoro Farm
Kokoro Farm has grown and provided seasonal and local cut flowers in the Gallatin Valley for 10 years. In 2024, Meara, one of the owners of Kokoro, was thrilled to learn about natural dyes from Mariah, at one of her Local Earth workshops. This experience opened up an entirely new and exciting way to enjoy flowers! Their cut flowers celebrate the fleeting beauty of seasons, but natural dyes permeate seasonal hues into something of more permanence. The natural and creative process of plant dyes felt like a seamless extension of organic farming.
Inspired, they have slowly started to incorporate and cultivate more dye-specific flowers and plants in their garden. Using local yarn raised by a neighboring ranch (Thirteen Mile Lamb and Wool), they have added naturally dyed yarn to their farm inventory—experimenting with small batch colors from raw and dried materials they grow. They intend to offer select dyed yarn and bulk dye plants for sale on the farm.
“This course was well worth every moment. It was multidimensional and invited me into the rich world of gardening and natural dyes in a way that was not only practical but also deeply meaningful and personally satisfying.”
Interested in learning more?
send an email to mariah@localearthstudio.com