Natural Dyes

This is one of the greatest color wheels we have ever seen! Lapham’s Quarterly looked at “natural” dyes and color from Egyptian Galena in 1900 BC to Nantucket Red in 1950! Fascinating and a must read. Click over to the article here. Image: Lapham’s Quarterly

Ecotextile New reports that “waste from the eucalyptus wood steaming process could potentially provide a natural dye source for dyeing cotton according to new research from South America. Researchers claim to have successfully used the coloured liquid waste produced in the steam treatment of eucalyptus wood as a natural dyestuff to colour cotton in an exhaust dyeing process without the addition of traditional mordants. The findings represent an interesting breakthrough, not least because Tencel, made by Austrian company Lenzing, is also made from extracted eucalyptus wood pulp. According to the research findings, the resulting dyed fabrics were evaluated for colour … Read more

Nautilus writes: “Black is technically an absence: the visual experience of a lack of light. A perfect black dye absorbs all of the light that impinges on it, leaving nothing behind. This ideal is remarkably difficult to manufacture. The industrialization of the 18th and 19th centuries made it easier, providing chemists and paint-makers with a growing palette of black—and altering the subjects that the color would come to represent. “These things are intimately connected,” says science writer Philip Ball, author of Bright Earth: The Invention of Color. The reinvention of black, in other words, went far beyond the color.” From … Read more

At our Easy Printing Techniques Using Natural Dyes workshop at the Brooklyn Fashion+Design Accelerator, attendees learned how to print with non-toxic and food-grade ingredients and how to explore simple screen printing and surface effects. Our final project was printing on a California Cloth Foundry t-shirt and wow the results were pretty amazing. Check out the results below!