DYE JOURNAL - ALCHEMY OF PLACE

Apr 14

Natural dye made from tree cuttings in my backyard and dried rose petals I’ve been collecting over the years.

Recently, I dove back into a natural dye book that I’ve had on my bookshelf for a few years and it has sparked the natural dye fire in me big time. Sasha Duerr’s Natural Color is such a beautiful reminder about working in harmony with your environment and what she refers to as the “alchemy of place”.

It’s one of my goals this year to return to my natural dye roots and spend some of my creative time exploring the natural color primarily in my local ecology. I’d like to journal about the journey as I go. I think the dye pots have a lot to teach me and I feel I’m finally ready to listen.

For those that have ever dabbled in natural dyeing, you know that it is addictive. Once you figure out that color comes from plants, you just want to dye all of the things! This obsession can carry me away and I tend to look to dye sources outside of my local scope. Now that natural dye extracts are more readily available from all over the world, it’s easy to pick out some colors online and dye to your heart’s content. But the connection to place is lost. The connection to seasonality is diminished. And that’s not the point of my journey this year.

I want to be in harmony with the seasons and my environment.

I’ve already almost strayed from my originally intended path…I’ve been experimenting with tree clippings from my yard, hibiscus flowers from a local grocer and some cutch dye extract that I had in my stash. My expectation was that the cutch and the hibiscus flowers— both from sources outside of my local scope— would yield the best and most surprising results. But I quickly came to see that the dye baths that were the most satisfying and lasting were made from the materials in my own backyard.

This week’s lesson is that sometimes you already have what you need.

Initial results from the dye bath with my local tree clippings.

Spring is a lovely time as the trees and flowers begin to bloom and come into their own. I’m now paying more attention to the cycle of my trees and want to explore their seasonality through my dye pots. Some attempts may be a total fail but that’s what experimenting is, right?

Next on the dye pot docket is clippings from our Japanese Maple now that the red leaves are coming in, branches from a mystery tree that looks like a plum tree (??), and a dogwood tree I spotted on my way to the studio last week.