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Video From LIVE FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Growing Dye Plants From Seed

This week’s FEEDBACK FRIDAY featured lots of helpful information to grow, harvest and dye with your own dye plants from seed. Watch the video recording here: Plant Workshop’s Milisa Moses, Botanical Colors’ President Kathy Hattori and Botanical Colors’ Sustainability Director Amy DuFault went over the basics of growing, harvesting and dyeing with your own dye plants starting from seed. We featured a few of the varieties that we love to grow and showed you what colors come from them. Milisa gave guidance for starting your own seeds and Kathy and Amy showed some dye techniques and colors achieved from a … Read more

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: This Week in Natural Dye Questions

Image: Honest Alchemy Each week, we are emailed with questions from our natural dye community asking simple and complex questions that we thought might be worth sharing. Here are a handful from this week answered by natural dyer in chief, Kathy Hattori, Founder of Botanical Colors: I am dyeing logwood on wool and only getting a brown color-what is happening? The rich purple color from logwood can be affected by cream of tartar. If you normally mordant with cream of tartar, try omitting it in the mordant process. You may also enhance logwood by adding a pinch (less than 1/8th … Read more

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: This Week in Natural Dye Questions

Video From LIVE FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Flora Obscura

This week’s FEEDBACK FRIDAY was with Flora Obscura founder/designer Alison Kelly. Alison Kelly is a fiber artist and fashion designer that creates one-of-a-kind textiles for Flora Obscura by adapting ancient natural dye techniques to combine with eco-printing: a process of laying flora directly onto cloth to be alchemically steamed and permanently imprinted with flora. Watch the video recording here: Here is her website. Here is her Instagram page. Some of the eco-printing books she mentioned: India Flint books Wild Colour by Jenny Dean And if you have time on Wednesday, October 7th to catch the RISD Nature Lab Common Thread … Read more

VIDEO: FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Narayan Khandekar + Porfirio Gutíerrez

Last week on FEEDBACK FRIDAY, we had presenters Narayan Khandekar who oversees the Forbes Pigment Collection in conversation on color and restoration with Zapotec Textile Artist + Natural Dyer Porfirio Gutíerrez. The two had mini-presentations of their work and then engaged in a wonderful and intimate conversation about color coming from their own unique work.

A Perfect Red: A Story of Cochineal

A Perfect Red is a marvelous story about the history of the “discovery” of cochineal by Europe in the 16th century. The tiny scale insect is one of the most compelling red colors in the natural dye palette and its introduction took Europe by a storm, garnering huge fortunes for Spain and England (who pirated tons of cochineal bounty from Spain). Author Amy Butler Greenfield details the challenges that it took to bring this dyestuff to market from the fall of the Aztec empire to Perkin’s discovery of mauve. Her 300-page book reads like a natural dye bodice-ripping historical romance … Read more

Tips For Using Less Water & Energy to Get Color

Here are some simple tips to help you use less water and energy to get the colors you want: 1. Try some of the innovative dye techniques as practiced by India Flint and Kimberly Baxter Packwood. Both these artists create using low-water and low resource methods that yield surprising and very beautiful results. Each has developed her method of eco-dyeing using windfall and waste materials and the pieces they produce are evocative of the spirit of a leaf or the wild meanderings of decomposing plant matter. 2. Take up fabric or yarn painting with natural dyes. You use less water … Read more

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: This Week in Natural Dye Questions

This week on FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Too much dye on yarn and which natural dye extracts can be used without mordanting?

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: This Week in Natural Dye Questions

This week: Is iron safe for babies, mordanting with tannins and getting a lighter hue and does liquid rhubarb like cotton?

Video From Live FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Sara Goodman

Our last FEEDBACK FRIDAY was with textile artist and natural dyer Sara Goodman whose textile background is pretty prolific including helping to get the Symplocos Project off the ground in Indonesia, serving on the Board of Directors of the Goodweave Foundation and teaching for decades the art of weaving and natural dyeing. Sara talked about her work and travels in pursuit of textiles around the world and now as Dye Studio Manager at New Hampshire based Sanborn Mills Farm’s being part of a team teaching traditional crafts and farming methods. Did we mention she also just co-founded the Northern New … Read more