News — dyeing with plants

Welcome to my first post in a series of blog posts I’m calling my 'Dye-ries’. As this very average pun suggests, it’s all about dyeing. Botanical dyeing, to be more specific. Each post will feature a different colour. Today I'm focusing on yellow ...sometimes a very loose interpretation of yellow depending on what kind of magic the mordants have worked. Before I get stuck in, let me say this isn’t an instructional series. It's a visual documentation of my sampling process of various natural dyes and how they react on different natural fibres with a selection of mordants.  If you'd...

Anyone that knows me, knows that I am not the biggest user of colour in my work. As Rei Kawakubo said ‘I work in three shades of black’.

So as much as I loved the idea of natural dyeing, I never really used it much for my clothing and textile designs because I couldn’t achieve the dark and moody shades I wanted. Natural dyeing was more of a fun experimentation on the side when I wasn’t after a certain look. As an Australian, the obvious choice for a dye substance is eucalyptus leaves. Where I live, there are trees coming out the wazoo...