Eco Dyeing Workshop

Every time I said to someone over the last month, 'Oh, I went to a dyeing workshop' I got blank and then horrified looks.

'DyEing' not 'dying' 💀 was the explanation that followed.

Before Christmas I did an eco-dye workshop with artist Aly de Groot. You can look up her website here: http://www.alydegroot.com.au/ 

She creates all sorts of wonderful things, including using ghost nets (abandoned nets found in the ocean) to weave jellyfish, and dyeing clothing with tea, gum leaves and more! 

What we used for the workshop was:

• Mordant: a substance, typically an inorganic oxide, that combines with a dye or stain and thereby fixes it in a material. We used 50% water, 50% vinegar, and rusty objects in a bucket. We also soaked any leaves that we wanted to print with in this bucket. It smelt atrocious!
• Fabric: cotton or silk. I had a cotton dress, a silk shirt, and a men's silk tie.
• Dye pot: gum leaves, lots and lots of gum leaves. We pre-boiled the pots with as many leaves as we could fit in. They created a brown dye.
• Patterns and printing: gum leaves, grevillea leaves, rusty wire, rusty trampoline springs, rusty nails, loose tea leaves
• String, to tie the bundles up

The pot on the left is the gum leaves boiling.
 

The process

1. Pre-soak the fabric in the foul-smelling bucket and wring it out.

2. Lay the fabric out on the table, and on half of it: 

• Scatter tea leaves on it if you want a copper/brown colour in patches.
• lay leaves out if you want their shapes to print on the fabric
• place rusty items if you want a black colour

3. Fold the fabric over and repeat step 2, continually laying out, scattering and folding until you have a small shape left.

4. Tightly roll this shape up into a bundle and secure with string. If you wrap it tightly, the string will create white lines where the dye cannot get to the fabric. It's a great effect.

These are my bundles. I also wrapped rusty wire around the outside, which gives a black colour. You can see that I got tea leaves everywhere...

 

5. The bundles go into the pre-boiled gum leaf dye pot, to simmer for 45 minutes.

If some of the bundle is sticking out of the water, you will get a different colour on it.

You can see the trampoline springs that some of us wrapped our bundles around, and plenty of leaves!

6. We tipped the pot and bundles out into a water bucket to cool them, then unwrapped each bundle to see how they had turned out.

We washed them off with a hose to get rid of the tea and leaves.

This is my cotton dress.

7. Let the fabric dry naturally, out of the sun (sun is terrible for clothes, really, it eventually bleaches anything). 

8. Once it has dried, hand wash with shampoo to help fix it. Let it dry naturally again.

9. At this point I then machine-washed my items. It is better to continue to handwash, especially silk items, but I was going to sell one of mine to a friend so I needed to know that it wasn't going to run colour anymore.

I was very happy with all three items, but particularly the silk shirt that appears to have a lightning storm on the back!

 

You can clearly see the gum leaves that I wrapped in the middle of the silk shirt:

The brown here is from the tea leaves, the black from the mordant and the trampoline spring:

The men's tie came out great as well. I put a lot of tea in it, and a couple of gum leaves.

I love that I got a whole leaf print on it!

The cross-hatch on the reverse side is from a rusty piece of metal that I wrapped the tie in.

The cotton dress retained more cream than I thought it would, but I did wrap it very tightly.

The lines are from the string that I wrapped around the outside.

There is a great range of colour in the skirt - even some green-ish patches!

Next: to try it myself at home! I continue to scour the op shops for clothes to practice on.