One of the personal projects I am working on at the moment is to make a Pojagi for my bedroom window. For the last year or so we’ve lived with the outside blind shut on our bedroom window, because street lights flood our room and it seems I can only sleep when lights are not shining in my face.

However, I am a lover of light during the day. And I’ve been living like a mole. So the blind is up and the light is coming in. Now a Pojagi does not really prevent much light from entering at all. Which is great! It’s going to be more of a privacy screen, and then at the window edges I’ll use some thicker linen to block the light that creeps around the edges of the indoor blind.

Anyway that is why I have recently been doing some dyeing with Madder roots. For my pojagi I wanted to do some nice subtle pale pinks with some pale greys…well clearly I underestimated my dye strength this time around. In the past I’ve always used a pre-ground powder, so 50g of dye basically dyed next to nothing. This time I went for the roots and chopped them myself.

The nitty gritty for my dye friends out there:

• Soaked whole roots overnight and strained off water (saved*)
• Chopped with scissors a few chunky roots, then chucked it all in a blender with a bit of water. Keep it runny or you blender wont love you.
• Put the resulting madder root milkshake into a big stainless steel cooking pot with some hot tap water and gave it a stir. Immersed my pre-mordanted fabrics and left overnight. (I went and turned my fabric about 3 times before i went to bed)
• On the second day I slowly brought the temp to about 55 degrees. I’m notoriously bad at measuring anything, so it may have been hotter or cooler. I could comfortably hold my hand in there for about 10 seconds.
• Turned off the heat and left overnight, turning the fabric whenever I remembered.
• The third day I checked my colour, and amazingly my PH with my new PH meter. It was sitting somewhere around 7 (it’s been a few days and I never write stuff down!!). I thought it was a bit too orange, so I added about a teaspoon of lime, turned on the heat for about 20 minutes (it didnt get as hot as on day 2), stirred. then left it for a few hours.
• I checked my PH after I took out my cloth and it was sitting at 7.6. So i feel like even with the addition of lime, I didn’t shift the colour too far past what it should be at neutral.

The PH is actually quite interesting to me. I’ve checked my tap water and our regular PH is about 8. It makes me wonder if the madder root itself lowers the PH of the water, or if my water was just a bit off the day I tested it, and normally it does sit closer to neutral. I’m sure I’ll get around to testing it again at some point.

Premordanting:

• Linen and silk / cotton were premordanted with soy.
• Silk organza mordanted with none / alum for a few hours (cold immersion) and alum overnight (cold immersion) alum not measured (few teaspoons?)

*Pre root chopping water – This water is said to be quite orange, which is why it gets tipped off and not used for dyeing. I decided to test this theory, and yep! It is orange. Very orange. If you want to dye orange, use your madder root soak water. I put my unmordanted silk in this, and left it in the sun in a metal pot for a day and night. It was pretty orange. I then added this piece to the main dye pot because I wasn’t a fan, but i cut a sample off first.

I’m planning on doing the grey with logwood, or maybe cutch. Crossing my fingers for not purple.

Exhaust Dyes are below. Left overnight and then brought up to 60 for 20 mins.

On my first day in Kyoto, I visited Aizen Kobo –  an old indigo dye house / shop. It is situated at the front of the family home, and the master dyer still works and lives there.
Aizen Kobo is the kind of store indigo dyers wished they owned. It is full of beautifully dyed textiles, and I would guess that around 25% of the textile bases used, are handwoven.

On entering the store I was shown around by an older man who I took to be the master dyer, whose English was reasonably good, and he showed me a few different fabrics, some ikat woven, some plain indigo dyed and some shibori dyed. We discussed the shibori dyed pieces the most, and he explained that each different design is stitched by a different family. Most designs are unique to each family, however some will do a few variations of one technique. Some of the cottons were priced at around $45 per metre (if memory serves) and I think the silks began somewhere round the $110 per metre mark. Which to be honest considering the intricacies of the designs, and the effort involved in dyeing each piece made the price very affordable.

It was a wonderful and interesting conversation and he talked about the difference in price not being just related to the different fibres, but also to how many dips in the indigo vat were required depending on the fibre. He said that cotton received around 80 – 100 dips, whereas some silk pieces were dipped over 200 times.

Naturally I was incredibly fascinated by this point, but unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to take photos of the work, which was a shame but it is obvious that they want to protect their family business, and seemed fair.

While walking around the shop we discussed dyes, and some of the work was not naturally dyed, however most was. It was easy to pick out the stuff that wasn’t naturally dyed. There was a large rack of sashiko thread however, and they were all naturally dyed. Despite my frustration with hand stitching anything, I was unable to suppress my desire to pick some up, so I grabbed more than any non hand sewer could ever need!

The older dyer vanished after awhile as I looked at the threads so then I spoke with his son, whose English was very good, and he named all the dyes used for me, and looked them up when he couldn’t find the right translation. He was an incredibly fascinating person to talk with and we discussed the indigo dye process a little as well as the “biz” in general. He did tell me his name, but I didn’t write it down quickly enough to remember!

He said there are only 5 indigo farmers left in Japan, and 5 dye houses. While from my perspective this is a bit of a fib, I am certain he is referring to the dye houses that have been around for numerous generations, that have passed their knowledge only within their families. From what I understand, knowledge isn’t typically shared outside a family or on a wider scale – the village, and taking on an outside apprentice doesn’t seem to happen lightly.

He told me about their vat, they use fermentation vats, and it is a very old vat that they have kept going for a very long time. I can only assume longer than his life time and I’m guessing he was in his 40’s. He has always been an indigo dyer, and he talked about how if their vat died their business would too, because their specific recipe, their vat bacteria is what gives them the shades of indigo specific to their dye house. It instantly made me think of sour dough breads, and that even if you have a starter all the way from paris, if you take it into a new environment, the bacteria in that new place changes it, and then its not longer a french sourdough.

Since it was around 5pm and I knew they would be closing soon, I asked if it would be possible to come back and see their vat the next day. I think we had a small language barrier here, as he began to tell me about how they don’t dye in the rainy season and he’d need to check the weather. (It was going to rain!) I asked why they don’t dye in the rain (thinking about my adventures of dyeing under a tarp last Spring!) and he said it is because they cannot gauge the final colour without the sun. This is something I have experienced myself, and it has always peeved me. I may from now on, no longer dye in the rain!

We spent a little further time chatting, and he told me that he liked my questions. I asked what he meant and he said ” Your questions have a point, you have a reason to ask them and you aren’t just asking how we do everything. Some people come here and they just ask “what is this design? what is it called? how do you do it? We are not a school, this is our life, it is not an artform it is our trade”.

I feel like perhaps my obvious delight with their work helped to grease the wheel. I didn’t visit the shop to try and steal designs, or copy them, I went to see REAL shibori. Real indigo dyed products, which after my disappointment in Arimatsu, was a very welcome sight.

All in all my visit to Aizen Kobo was inspiring, eye opening, interesting and definitely worth a visit if you happen to be traveling to Kyoto. Even if you aren’t a dyer, the shop was a delight to visit, and anyone interested in hand crafts would find something there to enjoy.

In my last post I touched briefly on the fact that I’ve picked up a lot of new stockists lately. Which is so totally fabulous and I am so proud to have my work at each and every one of them.

The downside to it though, is I have really been making the same thing quite a bit for the last few months and I really need to call a time out and be newly creative again.  I love my current designs and I don’t think I’ll stop making them anytime soon, but I’d like to add to them. Grow on from them and let them change as I learn new stuff.

I’m a reasonably time poor person, well I think I am. I have a small child who increasingly demands more of my attention and rightly so. My son is 4 and this is his last year at home with me before he starts school. This is our LAST year together where we get to hang out all the time and go to the park, and play and pretend we’re cats, dance and sing along to Taylor Swift (yes I really just admitted that) and just be best friends. Yes these things will carry on as he grows older, but we’ll never live this time again and something I think about increasingly as I get older is “this is it”. I won’t ever get to spend a year with my 4 year old son again.

So, this year I am only going to work, on “work” days. Trust me, this will be challenging. Right now I’m watching Peg + Cat while I write this blog post.  I’m a multi tasker at heart, but I’ve come to recognise that it’s tiring and I just can’t keep doing it if i want to remain sane!

To kick off my more relaxed way of living in 2015, next week I am going on a creative holiday. And I can’t wait! I have so many colours in my head, so many techniques I want to try out, so many product ideas to play with and so much learning and experimenting to do. It’s going to be seriously great. And with me being on holiday, I will hopefully have time to blog more about what I’m up to creatively.

Some of the things I’m hoping to work on are some new home wares, some knitting, naturally dyed colours besides indigo and whatever else I can dream up when I have the mental space to dream of it.

It’s going to be so awesome. Have you ever gone on a creative holiday?

It’s been a whirlwind frenzy of activity at my place lately, but I wanted to look back at the indigo shibori workshops I held recently at the Cecilia Fox warehouse in Brunswick.

Being able to hold the workshops in such a large bright space was really wonderful, and as always, I learned a great deal from my students, as well as they hopefully learned from me! At any rate a lot of fun was had by all, and a lot of great shibori and indigo dyeing was done. A huge thank you to everyone who came along to the workshops, you guys really made it great!

I am currently trying to work out dates for some workshops in the new year, so if you are keen sign up to my mailing list over in the right sidebar to be the first to know!

I was lucky enough to have the wonderful Lillie Thompson come along to take some snaps at the first workshop to remember the day by, so consider this a picture heavy post!

The photos below were taken by me at the second workshop :)

So it’s been a few weeks since I began this story of quilt making.  I feel quite nervous to be talking about these quilts with an audience, having spent so much time working on them, worrying over them and fretting in general.  I wrote the story below earlier in the year, when I was getting ready for Domestic Frontier, where this quilt made it’s debut.

The design of this quilt is inspired by early American quilting and also Native American textiles. My father’s mother immigrated to Australia from America in 1943 and my father and his brothers and sisters will swear up and down that we have Native American Sioux heritage. Looking at old photos of my grandmother it certainly seems possible and I am quite fascinated by this idea and I hope to explore it further in my designs. I am yet to visit the part of America my grandmother came from, but I’ve spent a little time in the states, and it is one of those places I find myself impossibly drawn to. It was in the US that I first realised my love of mountains; after years of tuning out when my father talked endlessly about his mountain climbing days.

The flying geese quilt block is speculated to have been used as code by slaves during the civil war, as a reminder to follow the geese north in the summertime and escape their bondage. Whether this is true or not, the triangle feels to me to be a symbol of both freedom and safety, it is geese with their wings spread, it is mountains reaching for the stars and it is the arrowheads used to hunt food and fend off predators.

I chose to dye this quilt with Indigo and Fustic, because one, they look great together, but also because they ground each other. They are the earth and the sky and in different lights they take turns on being both strong and gentle. A lioness and her cub. I feel like this quilt is a protector, it seems like a kind of armour and I imagine it keeping it’s owner safe and warm.

I do design both a front and a back before I begin the dye work for my quilt, and my favourite moment of this quilt is actually found on the back. Tiny variations flitter like dappled sunlight in the fustic dyed cotton and it makes me think of hot summer days, lying in the shade next to a lake, listening to the sounds of the bush.

This quilt was created over a period of 6 weeks from June 12, 2014 to July 31st 2014. It is the result of 26 hours of designing, dyeing, sewing, ironing, washing, and quilting. It is not perfect, but it is just right.

Happily this quilt has found it’s home. And even more happily it is going to a FAMILY. Just as I imagined it would. It really does bring tears to my eyes to know it will be loved well.

Photos in this post taken by Lillie Thompson.

I am so excited! It was announced today that I am a finalist in the Etsy Design Awards!!

A few weeks ago I decided to enter one of my new products, the summer quilt into the home and lifestyle category of the competition. Just to see how it went.

I am so incredibly thrilled that it went well! It’s really wonderful to have been selected as a finalist, especially when there are so many other amazing designers out there, creating great things.

The competition is judged by an excellent panel of experts, all of whom I admire greatly and I am so pleased that I have this opportunity for them to see my work. I hope they like it!

There is also a people’s choice prize which could see me flying to NYC to the etsy headquarters to do cool things, so I’d love it if you could take the time to vote for me.

It feels like a great achievement to make it this far, it would be a dream come true to win!

Derived from the leaves of the Indigo plant, there are a few different varieties. I use a certified organic Indian Indigo, Indigofera Tinctoria. The Japanese strain of Indigo has the botanical name of Polygonum Tinctorium, and is also known as Dyers Knotweed.  Australia also has it’s own indigenous Indigo, known as Indigofera Australis. It is a rather gorgeous shrub, and has delicate purple flowers in the springtime. For the gardeners out there, it likes a well drained position in half shade.

Working with Indigo requires patience, and persistence. When you dye with Indigo, you are required to re-dip your piece to build up the colour, and leave it to oxidise fully between dips. Repeated dipping also improves it’s wash and light fastness.  All of my work receives at a minimum 3 dips in the Indigo vat. The darker shades are built up over many more dips, and a piece I worked on recently had around 15 dips to reach the desired shade. That patience I mentioned earlier was starting to wear a touch thin by the end of that piece!

Indigo, while tricky to work with, is a great natural dye to begin your journey with. It is a lovely colour, it is challenging, and working with it is extremely satisfying.  If you’d like to learn more about working with Indigo, I do teach one day workshops, which will be starting up again in the springtime. If you’d like to come along and dip your proverbial toe in the vat (not your real toe, it WILL turn blue) then you can drop me a line via my contact page to be notified when classes are available for booking.

Here’s a little taste of the Indigo process, enjoy!

Fustic and Indigo green is The Best. This shade of green makes me slap my face a la Macaulay Caulkin and rather than scream, I kind of just go “eughaaargh” and make other nonsense noises because words just cannot explain how good it is.

Growing up in Australia I’m used to seeing stereotypical images of our bush (that’s Aussie for forest for any international readers), the ones where the ground is brown, the tree is brown, and the leaves are a dull greenish silver, or just army green. It does have it’s beauty and if you’re an art fan, please go look up John Glover. He’ll make you slap your face a la Macaulay as well.

For most of my life I have always found green rather boring, unless it was a beautiful foreign forest green, the kind I have never seen a great deal of living here. So imagine my incredible delight when I thought to myself “perhaps I will try a green” and stumbled upon this loveliness. Since I have it has opened my eyes to it in the Australian landscape too. Now I see it everywhere. It flashes out at me like little emerald gems that were once secreted away because to see them always would tarnish their beauty.

I know I say this about every colour, but I think it’s my favourite. It is however a harder colour to achieve. Well, it’s not really hard per say, it’s just that it takes longer to achieve, because you have to dye your textile twice. In the world of natural dyes that means in whatever order you choose to work, you effectively dye your work three times, because fustic requires a mordant first. If you want to do it on cotton, it means 3 mordants and 2 dye jobs! That is just crazy, what kind of lunatic would spend that much time dyeing something?

Me.

I have never been a yellow person. It is just NOT my colour. If I try to wear something yellow, I look hideously ill, it’s terribly unbecoming. That was however, until I discovered Fustic.

My experience with fustic has given me astoundingly beautiful mustard tones of yellow, which deepen in shade quite quickly depending on the amount of dye used. It’s a very economical dye, a little goes a long way. It is another dye I enjoy the smell of, it’s hard to describe, but the word that springs to mind first is sticky. Which is fitting, because it does create a rather sticky goo when you first add water to it. So it has a sticky tannin smell. Maybe a bit like old dried cow dung? That sounds unpleasant and I’m sure my husband thinks it reeks horribly, but once again I do not. The smell of cows and dirt and grass and trees with a hint of woodsmoke? Maybe none, or all of those things! I shall leave that up to you to decide if you try dyeing with it.

Fustic works well on all the fibres I have tried. It gives a brighter yellow on alpaca, a bright chartreuse I would call it, and a mustard on merino.  It also gives a mustard on cotton, and like all natural dyes, changes depending on the light. Fustic has that lovely glow that all natural dyes in my experience have. Synthetic dyes just can’t beat it.

Fustic has good to excellent wash and light fastness on protein fibres, and seems to be doing well on my cotton too.

Last, but not least, when you marry fustic to indigo, you get a beautiful green offspring that is so green, even pine trees get jealous. I’ll be blogging that love story soon.

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!