Welcome To My Dye Pot

Welcome To My Dye Pot September 20, 2010
I’ve been working on a whole bunch of new projects in the last couple of weeks, especially I’ve been putting one of my birthday presents to work!
I got this awesome book all about dyeing without using any toxic chemicals, with natural plant materials. India Flint also has an amazing blog which is how I found her in the first place. I love her frank discussion of pre-treating fabric by making ash water, using milk, and saving your own urine! She writes about how to make bundles of fabric and steam them to get intense colors. It feels like a magical process to me, like I’m making a talisman of dye stuff and fabric.

My husband is horrified at the bizarre chemistry experiments going on all over the house, but I am delirious with delight creating colors and pattern on fabric. So far I’ve experimented with beet pickle juice

pickled beets and fabric wrapped around copper pipe:
and walnut husks from the the alley next to my house:


In keeping with my magical feelings about this whole process, I think I’m going to make my fabrics into spirit bags, or maybe spirit dolls. I need to let my fabrics speak to me. Using all these natural, local materials seems to imbue the fabrics with a life of their own. They have an aura of selfness that I don’t notice with other fabrics.
Maybe it is my own energy that I’ve poured into them by collecting the materials, processing them into dye, and preparing the fabric for weeks before I dye them. Or maybe it is the spirit of the tree and the land that I’ve collected and transmuted into this coloring on fabric. Maybe it’s both.

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