Pigments of Nature

Both the palette and process of natural dyes have a way of drawing people in; the rusty reds, marine blues and sunny peaches have an indescribable magic you just can't find in synthetics.

For millennia, dyeing was an entirely natural process, with leaves, bark and wood, roots, flowers, fruits and even insects creating a rainbow of fibre colourings. But these days, most of the textile industry revolves around synthetics, following the development of the first synthetic dye in 1857. More predictable and scalable, synthetics swallowed up the traditional dye markets—and subsequently the know-how. 

Yet among today's artists, historians and creatives, these traditional techniques are making a quiet comeback. This small but growing community is reviving the lost traditions and passionately sharing knowledge about ingredients, recipes and techniques to all those who will listen. 

Foraged, familiar and repurposed

Natural dyes come from a lot of surprising sources. Yes, turmeric, blackberries and beets initially come to mind, but the natural dye recipe book is expansive. Janna Maria Vallee, Sunshine Coast textile artist and owner of Everlea Yarn, is one local artist who has dedicated her career to exploring the world of natural dyes. She dyes a line of merino wool yarns with colours sourced from both familiar and unexpected places. She uses the sawdust from her workshop, like Osage, for a true yellow and purple heart for olive hues. Or she'll collect foraged finds from around her Sunshine Coast home. Vallee will even pull from farther afield, like indigo and cochineal, to expand the colour spectrum of her offerings. 

Another local designer, Christine Wieting, the Salt Spring-based maker behind SeaDog Designs, has also fallen in love with natural dyes, specifically avocado pits. She uses pits repurposed from kitchen waste sourced from Dos Amores Tortilleria to produce warm tans and peach blushes across the dresses, kimonos and pillowcases in her collections.

A labour of love

One thing was clear after speaking with both Vallee and Wieting: dyeing naturally is a long and often meandering process. Nothing is as simple as a quick dip in a dye vat for a bright, colour-fast final product.

Take Wieting's process of dying with avocado pits as an example of why you can't expect to complete a piece in a day. SeaDog Designs is a decidedly slow fashion enterprise, especially when Wieting uses the natural dyeing process. For her, "It takes at least a week of each day doing a little bit of work: making the dye one day, soaking it, hanging it to dry, putting the elastic band design on it and soaking it in soda ash. Then the next day you add the colour, then hand paint it." Over a dozen steps result in a one-of-a-kind kimono with hand-painted detailing.

Vallee's process for dyeing her line of organic wool yarns requires just as much patience, if not more. In her case, finishing a skein of yarn can take upwards of a month thanks to the dozen or more steps, including mordanting (a process to improve light and wash fastness), dyeing, washing, curing and several stages of drying. 

All these steps, while critical to the outcomes, are also what make natural dyeing so fascinating. There is a lot of tinkering between the ingredients, fabrics and techniques, and there are often many rounds of experimentation. But that's all part of the magic with natural dyes. They all have unique personality traits that you have to learn to get along with. It takes time to understand each ingredient’s quirks—but for those with patience, the payoffs are incomparable. 

The allure of natural dyes

When was the last time you heard anyone wax poetic about diphenylmethane derivatives or triphenylmethane, two common ingredients in the synthetics industry? Yet when fibre artists and designers speak about natural dyes, they light up as they describe every single nuance within the process and the palette.

Vallee explains, "I just tend to prefer the way natural dyes look but as an artist, they're very convenient; they always harmonize with each other. So no matter what I do, it looks good. There's no clashing that happens." Another benefit for Vallee is that when she teaches weaving workshops, she doesn't have to focus so much on colour theory because the naturally dyed yarns all seamlessly flow together.

Wieting specifically saves the natural process for her specialty collections, going all-in on avocado pits. As she says of the colour, "It's so unexpected, you really wouldn't expect it to be that pinky-peach. It's such a beautiful colour, and you can't really replicate it with non natural dyes. It's really special." 

Both Wieting and Vallee are unanimous in their love for dyeing with botanicals. As Vallee says, "It's a preference of palette," but for both artists, it's clear that it's also the thoughtful and meditative process that has drawn them into its warm embrace.