Hello! It’s been 48 hours since I arrived back home in Melbourne from my work / play holiday in Japan. I’m slowly sifting through my photos and writing a series of blog posts about some of the places I visited and the experiences I had while there.

If you’ve been following me on instagram  then you will have seen a preview of the amazing places I visited that relate to textiles, shibori and indigo dyeing. Well, you’re in luck if you also want to see the extended story of my trip. Over the next few weeks I’ll share info and images from my journey which I hope will help anyone out there in internet land who is planning a trip to Japan to explore traditional Japanese textile crafts.

If you haven’t been following me on instagram, check it out via the sidebar for a preview of what I have coming up, or just follow along here! I’ll be posting bi-weekly until I’ve covered all the places I’ve visited that i think you’ll find interesting.

I started dyeing yarn because I wanted great coloured yarn for all the knits I make for my son. He wears a lot of vests, and he looks cute as a button in them!

Anyway, with my conquering of the Indigo vat I decided to start sticking yarn into it, and then also thought about other natural dyes that I’ve been itching to try. With the help of a fantastic customer who basically said to me “have at it, I’m sure it will be great!” I have, in the past week also tried my hand at dyeing with Madder and Cochineal.

Ah yarn. Yarn love! Such glorious colours from such wonderful natural dye sources. I also dyed some yarn with Eucalyptus, continuing my experiments with that as a dye source.

I’m pleased to announce that you can now purchase yarn via the shop, dyed to order.

On another note, if you’re not a follower of my facebook page, (then why not??) but you will have missed that Bend and Snap has been cancelled for this Sunday the 30th of June. I will now be at Bend and Snap market on July 28th 2013. So if you were thinking to yourself “I’m going to go and buy some shibori from Vic this weekend” then you’ll have to do it via the website!

I started out trying to do some eco printing on silk with eucalyptus. I steamed my bundled leaves and then after an hour happily unravelled them to find…not much. I got some very pale yellow leaf prints, not the glorious reds and pale greens I was expecting.

So I did some overdyeing. My favorite has been overdyed with logwood (above) and has an iron mordant (improving the lightfastness of the logwood as an added bonus). It’s very earthy and rustic.

Then I overdyed some others with purple carrot (above) and also red cabbage (not shown). Interesting results! I created twist resists on these to preserve the original colour so there would be some patterning. I quite like these too, they are pale but also quite pretty.

I also solar dyed 2 scarves (below, shown together), one with a mix of berries and a bit of callistemon, and the other just with calistemon. The darker one is the berries. I actually prefer the paler on in this instance, the callistemon gave a nice earthy dusky pink.

Yesterday I decided to try my hand at eco printing again, being a long weekend I had a little more “me” time. (Thanks husband!!)

Well, yesterday’s efforts paid off, I got some stunning results!

These will all be up for sale at the Rose St Market this coming Sunday!! I’ve also just bundled up some of the Merino so fingers crossed it does as i intend. If so, it will also be available on Sunday.  If you see anything you like and wish to purchase, drop me an email! vic@bindandfold.com

PS, I’ll take some snazzier photos when the weather improves. It’s been yucky and grey all day! Just when I need some sunshine for my camera, poo poo.

Sadly it is not to be for a few weeks I imagine as I have other work that must be attended to first, but this is good in a way as it will allow me to really centre my thoughts on what I want to achieve with natural dyes, and where I want to begin. I will also have time to thoroughly devour this book. Look at these pictures! Amazing!

Speaking of beginning, I have been surveying my overgrown grass filled garden beds (previous tenants damn you!!) and have chosen this spot for my dye garden. You can see (below) that I’ve tried to kill off some of the grass and then just stopped. Well that is because a family of not so friendly European wasps is living next to that very last spindly gum tree on the right, so I am waiting for them to die in the cold weather before i destroy their nest and search out their eggs for destruction. This sounds very calculated and evil of me I know, but well, I don’t like wasps. They seem to be quite prolific around the suburb I live in too, and I’d like to at the very least partially eliminate them from my yard.

Then I will have to clear most of the grass before I prep the bed lasagna style for planting in spring. It frustrates me immensely that I have begun to take an interest in growing my own dyes right smack bang at the wrong time of the year!

Rita Buchanen’s book is also very interesting and is more gardening focused, I think I will rely on it quite a bit when I am planting. It’s already helped me choose my garden location, since most of the things I am planning on planting require full sun.

The biggest plus to the position of my dye garden is that just to the left of it (out of frame) lies the windows of my studio and a door straight onto the garden. So when I am actually working inside I will be able to look out at all that I have grown. What a feeling that will be.

I wont detail all the timing here, but the first 2 dips were both 10 mins each and then after that I moved into shorter dips. I had approx 4 – 8 minutes oxidisation between dips, where I kind of waved my swatches about to make sure each piece was aerated.

While researching Indigo online, trying to find more info about hydros vat set up etc, (I couldn’t find much at all!) I did stumble across a really wonderful natural dye blog called tinctory. So many beautiful images, so much beautiful dye work, and the jewellery created from it, just stunning. I’ve been so inspired that I’ve ordered some natural dye books, and am trying to hunt down some Japanese Indigo seeds and a few other dye plant seeds to plant my own dye garden.

In the meantime I intend to try some dyeing with scavenged natural dyes, like grass, eucalyptus, and berries. Wish me luck!!

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