Reflections on the Maiwa Natural Dye Workshop
I can't get enough of the Maiwa online workshops — they are truly some of the best classes I have ever taken, online or in person. I completed the Natural Dye Workshop last month.
The course & samples
I participated in the Natural Dye Workshop from May to July. Over the course of 10 weeks, I created nearly 200 unique dye/fiber samples. I spent my mornings, evenings, and weekends stirring hot dye baths, dividing and tagging fabric samples, and untangling and reskeining yarns. So much work — but look at the rainbow of samples I produced!
Similar to the Journey Into Indigo course, the magic of this workshop is in the repetition. Every week, we made 6+ dye baths and practiced various ways of creating them — from using a dye bag, to putting the raw materials directly in the bath, to making an extract, to letting the materials soak for hours before adding fabric — and talked about why you might use one method over another. We also had two weeks where we overdyed everything with iron and indigo. All this practice made me feel incredibly confident that I can take any recipe and use it to dye any fiber. And it also made me interested in sourcing my own materials (maybe a dye garden in the next few years?!).
I feel so much more comfortable managing yarn in a dye bath too. My new rules:
The more figure-eight ties, the better.
Tidy the yarn while it's still wet instead of waiting for it to dry.
And when the yarn seems super tangled, dip it in water to loosen the threads, snap it, and repeat.
Exhaust baths produce some wonderful pastel and sherbet shades — some of which I liked better than the original colors. But I really need to either 1) incorporate exhaust bath shades into my designs or 2) pre-mordant fibers so I can use the exhaust baths immediately after the first dye bath. Keeping baths around, especially in the hot summer, is no good. Lots of gross smelling, syrupy liquid... and mold. Yuck.
I had some issues with uneven dyeing, especially on the cellulose fibers. The absolute worst was the tightly woven cotton (which incidentally is my least favorite fiber to work with). My long indigo pieces also came out blotchy. I think both of these can be attributed to not thorough scouring and wetting out and leaving dye baths unattended and still for too long.
I did like some of the unevenness, especially on the fibers with more texture, like hemp and linen. It made the color feel less flat.
My silk and wool samples came out super well... with the exception of the Eastern Brazilwood. That sample was puzzlingly blotchy. Not sure what happened there. Here it is compared with the lac.
Two things really surprised me:
How much time I spent dividing and labeling samples, especially the yarn (skeining, untangling, reskeining, weighing to get approximately even samples...). I think I spent more time doing that than the actual dyeing!
How delightful it is to dye fiber that has a natural color. Some of my favorite shades came from the natural linen and heathered gray yarn.
Progress posts
For more info about each specific week, check out my progress updates throughout the course.
Next step: Dye journals
I've been working hard on aggregating all my samples into dye journals. There are going to be three:
Dye-focused: All samples that used a particular dye, regardless of fiber type. You can see the cochineal page on the right.
Yarn-focused: All samples of a particular yarn type/shade. One of two gray wool pages is on the left.
Fabric-focused: All samples of a particular fabric type/shade. You can see the cotton page peeking out from the middle of the right pile.
I have all my individual pages done and am working on the binding and covers. I want these to be truly special so I'm brainstorming different techniques. I'll post again once they are complete.