In honour of natural dyes.
With my Master in Archaeology it's perhaps unsurprising that I adore the ancient craftsmen processes.
Picture: some of my own experiments with natural dyes on calico and fleece.
Imagine…
… if the first people who ever baked cake were long forgotten and in modern times, cakes were baked using a powder that you add water to.
Can you imagine people would’t know that they could use eggs and flour for this?
I’m not making this up.
In the documentary “Century of the self” you can see how companies in the 50’s tried to get women not to use eggs in their pancake mixes.
The mixes didn’t sell well and in focus groups they tried to find out how the product could sell better. They discovered that housewives felt guilty about instant pancakes and if they just added the egg to the mix, they felt better about themselves having ‘cooked’ for their family. After leaving the egg replacer out of the pancake mix the product was a hit!
I feel very similar about natural dyes.
The skill you need to dye fabrics may be a bit more advanced than baking cake (some people may disagree) but nevertheless, it is a skillful process using natural ingredients, producing beauty and wonder.
We have completely forgotten how to do this and instead are using polluting chemicals.
Maybe I can go into the process of the "forgetting" another time, it is not a beautiful story, but the result is that, on our textile treasure hunts, we have found very few fabrics still dyed with natural dyes.
Here are some examples:
I fear we are losing something very precious due to simply not paying attention to what is vulnerable and really precious.
The process takes longer than dyeing with artificial dyes and one needs to know what to do, where to find the raw materials, how to recognize them, how to treat them (dry/ferment/soak/boil/mix with something else...) before they give their colours.
So nowadays you can find browns/soft yellows and brownish/rusty reds and that's it. Of course we still have indigo so top that up with some adorable shades of blue.
Some more natural dye batiks:
But think of so many oil paintings and tapestries in our museums created with natural pigments and think of the lustre of those colours!
What was achievable in those days...
What a loss!
This of course ties in with why I do what I do, why I decided to only design my collections around handmade fabrics.
While I still can.
While there still are handmade fabrics around.
A knowledge base that built up over thousands of years has disappeared over the course of 1 generation.
Now, for the natural dyes, we may be able to revive some colours, the simpler ones to make, but the fine art of batik is at risk of disappearing as well as many other heritage textile crafts.
Maybe you can think of an art or a craft that you can help preserve by raising awareness or by changing your consumption pattern?
I’d love to hear from you!
With love,
Marijke