Make things or dye trying

*I wish every day was Dye Day*

Half way through 1st semester of last year, my coworker, Laurie, and I had a genius idea. Both of us are keen on using dyes from natural sources and thought it would be prudent to expand our knowledge and sample collection by having a dye day once a week. Thursday became the day, and it was Thursday that I looked most forward to every week. I probably should not be admitting this, but we even started dressing for dye day by wearing a colour in the range we were planning on sampling. Embarrassing, I know. :|

So that had to end when school got out, most unfortunately, and Thursdays just became regular old Thursdays again.


Though I miss it, it's a good thing that dye day is on hiatus, as the task of organizing all my samples from the past year sits, precariously piled, on my horizon.

I love organizing, because I'm a superdork 5000, but for some reason this jobby* just seems so daunting. My samples, until recently, have just sat stashed in a box, only taking them out to admire them once in a while. I took the picture on the right back in February, so it only shows just under half my samples. Throughout the year, Laurie and I tried 27 different dyestuffs, on average using 3 different mordant pots per dye, +1 for the dyestuff with no mordant, for a total of approximately 100 dye pots. And I had 7 different materials in each pot, so I'm looking at organizing around 700 samples.

I love my samples, and they've kind of become weird, inanimate pets to me. I was just talking to Laurie today about how I have observed that textile people seem to have an affinity for hoarding. Not like finding mouldy sandwiches under a 10 year's worth of newspaper, but more like an aversion to throwing away or donating something that may be deemed useful, or amassing and sorting things that we perceive as beautiful or inspiring.

So basically what I'm trying to say is that I'm a dye-sample hoarder. There. Glad I got that off my chest.

I love colour, though maybe at first glance you wouldn't know, as I use it so sparsely in my work. I love how it influences mood, prompts memory, changes when paired with another. I used to loath my colour theory class in university, but now I find myself returning over and over again to the things I learnt.

Theses colours (above) are a few I grouped together from my Hemp Canvas samples(the fabric I make my aprons out of). The colours together remind me of the variation you see in shells or pebbles on the beach (Which, incidentally, I also hoard, I mean, collect...)

It is frustrating to me that, for textiles, colour is difficult to come by in a trully environmentally sound way. In my work, I use acrylic textile base and pigments for my colour blocking. Though it is inert when printed, it is still derived from a non-renewable resource, which is why I limit my use of it.

So I love exploring dyestuff from plant and animal matter, because it comes by it's colour honestly. Mordants do have an environmental imact, so I limit my use of them. In practice I opt for the organic compounds like tannic acid, and avoid the the synthesized heavy metals as much as possible.

I digress though. The reason I am writing this post is because I have finally started to organize these little swatches. It took about 6 months of consideration (which is really too long to be thinking about samples), But I've finally concluded that I want to organize them by fabric type, then by colour achieved within that fabric, rather than by dyestuff then fabric within that dyestuff. That was a convoluted sentence, but you know what I mean, right?
These are some of my industrial felt samples (above). Because it's wool, the colours are very vivid; definitely the brightest out of all my materials I sampled.

One last pic to leave you with: My samples from our Sandalwood or Sanders Wood dye

day. We used an old dyestuff that a former faculty had left in the studio. I don't know how to get a hold of more, which is too bad really because the colours are just so wonderful. There are six samples here instead of our usual 4 for 2 reasons. The colourant in Sandalwood is water insoluable, so we first had to soak our sawdust in alcohol for a minimum of 1/2 an hour. The very pale sample set, bottom centre, is the bath we made with sawdust that had only been soaked in water. For the rest of the samples, once the sawdust had been soaked in alcohol, the mixture was then added to water, then strained. We tested the dye (clockwise from top left) with alum/cream of tartar, without mordant, with iron, and with tin (which, incidentally I don't actually use in my work for environmental/health reasons). The very bottom left samples are without mordant, but we put these samples in an afterbath of ammonia. This pushed the PH level towards moderately basic, changing the colours from pinks to purples. Most red natural dyes are very PH sensitive, so the colour is easily affected by the water you wash and dye it in, the soaps you use, etc. Pretty nifty, right???