I’ve been on semi holiday for the past week. Semi in that I haven’t dyed anything, for work, but I’ve still been around, posting orders, sharing things on instagram and cleaning out my studio.

When I am working I often forget how important it is to stop and take a break. Now that I am on one (for a few more days at least!) I have been looking back over the past year, as well as wondering where the new one will take me.

It’s a time of year when I am so tired, I become disenchanted with my work, and myself. I reach a point where I just think “no, I can’t keep going. I can’t do it. I have to stop.” So I do stop and then I feel sad for having done so! I look back and feel that I have not succeeded enough.  The abruptness of a holiday sort of sends me into shock, since I am so used to being in a frenzy. Something to work on in the new year.

Here is a list of the good things I did in 2014, both professionally and personally to remind myself of how far I’ve come.

◦    I explored natural dyes further than I had previously and began working with cellulose fibres
◦    I designed a new home wares collection which I absolutely love, and is now stocked all over Australia
◦    I now have 18 stockists around Australia and New Zealand, with more to be announced in the new year
◦    I learned to machine knit
◦    I discovered a love for running and exercise in general, and in the process lost 15kg! I now run over 20km a week, every week.
◦     I learned more about my craft through reading and experimenting with new fabrics, fibres and techniques
◦    I worked alongside and was cheered on by a wonderful community of makers, many of whom I have had the pleasure of meeting.
◦    I taught a number of Indigo Shibori workshops in Melbourne, met some amazingly creative people; and had the pleasure of not only teaching them, but also learning from them.

Have you found yourself in an end of year slump too? Or are you ready and eager to jump feet first into the new year?

Also here’s cheers to a happy new year!

* Pics in this post are a small selection of my faves from 2014

I have always found the colour red to be immensely appealing.  It’s bright, yet dark, it glows, but can be sombre. It’s the colour of love, blood, danger, the desert and fire engines. It means different things and triggers different emotional responses depending on the context in which it is used.

Possibly the loveliest part of dyeing with madder, is the smell of it. It has a rich earthy sweet smell, and it just smells red!  Standing at the stove, checking my dye, breathing in the sweet earthy aroma makes me feel really connected to what I am working on. It conjures up a sense of well being and warmth, contentment and pleasure.

If I was a religious person I would say it feels like a prayer. Standing at the stove, feeling the heat, breathing in the dye’s scent, it centres me and makes me calm. I imagine it’s how a chef feels when they are concocting a culinary masterpiece, and all the flavours come together just so, and they can smell it, and they know the joy of what they’re making before it is done.

Madder is a traditional dye plant and it’s use has been dated as far back as 2000 BC.  The dye is present in the root of the plant, and is cultivated in 3 year intervals. I would love to grow my own madder for use, but the 3 year wait to then harvest has dissuaded me so far.

All my experiments with Madder root have been on merino and alpaca yarns. I would like to attempt a Turkey Red on cotton one day, but the length of time and investment involved in using it with a plant based fibre is daunting to say the least. I will do it eventually, even if just to say that I have.

Madder root is quite a weak dye and requires a lot of it for depth of shade. It can make for a bit of a thrilling dye experience because then if you screw up, you know you might as well have set some money on fire instead! The upside however when it works out is you get a brilliant deep red, and you can then use the dye bath again and again to achieve lighter shades. The lighter corals, peaches and pinks are quite lovely, and are just as colourfast.  They remind me of the roses that grow in the front yards around Moreland at the end of summer.

Madder is considered to be very light and washfast, and can be good to use as a control sample when testing other dyes for the same. The most important technical thing to remember when you dye with Madder Root is to not let it get too hot, or your colour will not be as pleasantly vibrant.

Enjoy your dyeing with Madder! Don’t forget to take a moment to relax, breathe it in, and let it’s earthy wonderfulness wash over you.

Merino throws dyed with Madder available in the shop!

These days the impact that I have on my environment and the world as a whole is quite an important deciding factor in the way that I work. At the moment I am able to work at a level where I know that I am working in a sustainable way. Working with natural dyes is obviously going to have less impact on the environment at the point of manufacture, and for someone like myself who plans to grow, harvest and extract their own dyes, sustainability would be about as high as it can really get in this day and age.

Whether or not working with natural dyes would be sustainable when used in a high paced manufacturing environment is debatable, and it’s my belief that if only natural dyes were used in all manufacturing they would not be, but when they are being used by a single artist working alone in their studio to create one of kind pieces, the carbon footprint is small.

I also want to talk about sustainability in relation to consumerism. One speaker at at seminar I recently attended made a comment, which was said quite quickly and perhaps wasn’t very well thought out that nearly had me leaving their talk as soon as they said it. The comment was about how people want an experience when they are shopping, and sometimes people just walk into a store and they don’t know what they want, but they just want to buy something in that store. Anything.

For me, that concept of purchase just to have that experience of purchase –  it is just the opposite of who I am. I absolutely never do that kind of thing. Maybe that stems from me becoming more frugal since becoming a mother, from my raised awareness of my impact on the earth, or by my realisation that I don’t want to own stuff just for the sake of it.

For many years now I’ve teased my husband about moving to a commune and living off the land, of not being constantly bombarded with technology and media, and advertising and branding etc etc etc. Of course I think I’d manage about 2 days of that lifestyle before I was curled into a ball crying softly for my iphone…but still, a balance is necessary! Even as a small business owner who wants to derive a liveable working income from my craft, the idea of consumption just for the sake of it just doesn’t work for me.

I’ve had this post sitting here for quite some time, in fact I’d forgotten I’d written it! But this morning this blog post popped up in my news feed due to following Judy Hill on facebook and it reminded me of all I had written. It’s a wonderfully informative post about natural dyes and how they can cause the destruction of an environment, specifically how brazilwood is no longer available as a dye source because it has all been harvested.