Breaking the Boundaries of my Comfort Zone with Natural Dyes - by Sue Sherman

 

One of the most fundamental forks in the path of any career is the choice to be a generalist or a specialist.  Do I try to learn a little bit about a lot of different specialties in my discipline? Or do I try to become the absolute best I can be in a very narrow niche?  In my first career I took the former; it was a good choice as I got to work on quite a lot of different kinds of projects, and it also provided a great foundation for managing multidiscipline projects. 

But when I retired from my first job and started a serious career as a fibre artist, it didn’t take long for me to realize that I wanted to try the other fork in the road this time.  After about a year of playing the field, I settled on an artistic technique (painting with thickened dyes) and started developing a style of my own (creating realistic looking fibre art featuring animals based on my own photographs).  And a couple of years after that I specialized a little further by (mostly) creating art that makes a statement about the environment, like the quilt shown above (from 2023) with penguins using their vote to have a say in their collective response to climate change.  I have now been following this very specific path for a few years now, and it never ceases to amaze me how much more I can learn about doing this one thing – the rabbithole keeps opening up more and more opportunities as I dig deeper into it! 

So why would I want to learn a completely new technique?

Well . . . my concern for the environment always brings me back to the way in which I do my work.  In particular the dyes I use, Procion MX dyes, are synthetic dyes that involve the use of chemicals to bond with the fibres to create those rich, strong colours.  These dyes also require quite a lot of water for preparing, dyeing and washing out. 

The alternative to synthetic dyes is to use natural dyes, using bits of plant and rusty nails to create lovely patterns on fabric.  As a member of the Art Cloth Network I have seen some truly amazing work by other members who are masters of natural dyeing processes.  Natural dyes have always intrigued me, but seemed to involve a bit too much witchcraft and forest lore, and anyways I was pretty sure they couldn’t be used to create work within my selected niche.  But finally the siren call of the unknown was too loud to ignore, and it seemed a good time to take a class in natural dyeing just so I could finally set aside that thought and be content making realistic artwork with my chemical dyes.

Good thing I’m able to admit when I’m wrong!  Well, not about the witchcraft and forest lore part, but who knew that natural dyes could be used to create realistic artwork on fabric?  I signed up with Maiwa.com for their online class “Printing and Painting with Natural Dyes”.  It was designed around some simple methods of applying colour to fabric using thickened natural dyes.  Methods demonstrated in the online videos included block printing and painting simple shapes onto fabric.  But by using my own brushes (which range from teeny-tiny to medium sized) and my library of animal photographs to do the class assignments, it became evident that there is a lot of potential here! 

Natural dyes are more complicated than chemical dyes.  No doubt about it.  For starters, they don’t come in jars labelled “yellow” or “red”, but by the names of the plants (or bugs) they contain.  You need to learn how to prepare each raw material to create the liquid dye, and how each one reacts to tannins or iron.  Some need to be boiled and extracted, some just mix with water; some need to be strained and some not.  And you need to know about mordants and how to apply them to the fabric where they will react with the dye.  Bottom line, you can’t really be sure what you are going to get with a particular dye on a particular fabric using a particular method until you test it, so you need to keep good notes of what you did to create each colour, as shown in the above sampler.

And when the process is complete you will need to steam your fabric to heat set the dyes for a permanent bond, and which also modifies the colour of some of the dyes.  We used a bamboo steamer over hot water, for 30-60 minutes depending on the piece.  And depending on the method used to prepare and dye the fabric, you may need baths of chalk or bran or plain water to initiate certain reactions.  Yikes!  But in the end you can do some really great things with it.

I’m just at the beginning of exploring this particular branch of my rabbithole, but here is what I have found so far:

First and foremost, you can get a really good black with myrobalan and iron.  Given that my work involves a lot of penguins and a few zebras, this is no small thing.  I have never been able to get a true black with chemical dyes – it usually turns out as a very dark navy blue.  You don’t necessarily notice it to look at, but I can really tell when I go to stitch on it and the black thread doesn’t match. The zebra below was one of my first pieces painted with thickened natural dyes, and you can see how true the black stripes are.  The test splotches on the bottom are of four different natural dyes that come out black or close to it (myrobalan, gallnut, pomegranate and cutch) that I was auditioning for this piece.  I'm looking forward to getting this under my longarm for some thread painting!

Second, this class introduced me to painting with thickened dyes on silk and linen, and investigating how the colours look on these other fibres.  (To be clear, I could probably have learned how to do that with my thickened chemical dyes but just never got around to it.)  I love silk and linen, and can see this opening up a whole new area for me. 

The three images below are of the same rose created with mostly the same natural dyes on three different fabrics.  The second and third images were painted at the same time - the thin silk on the top allowed residual dye to pass through it to the lightweight cotton below.  I'm still trying to decide what to do with these.

Rose on heavy natural (unbleached) cotton

Rose on silk

Rose on lightweight cotton that was
underneath the silk when I painted it.

On the downside, I find the natural dyes to be much more difficult to clean, and much less forgiving if you happen to leave them too long before trying to remove them from brushes, palettes, mixing tools and my laundry sink.

And another downside is that natural dyes use a shocking amount of water in the various pre- and post-dyeing baths, not to mention the heat of dye preparation and steaming the finished pieces.  I still think that if you look at the total environmental impact of the two types of dyes, from manufacture through to disposal, the natural dyes are probably better, but not by the clear margin I was expecting.

I will definitely be adding a variety of natural dye techniques to my toolbox moving forward, especially for artwork involving penguins.  The piece below is 12"x12" and features a penguin image created using natural dyes.  The frame is part of the same whole cloth, and was created by painting with metallic fabric paint.  I then trimmed very near the quilting stitches and finished the edges with more metallic paint. 

 

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