Horace

Yesterday I decided to do my well overdue “Animal Vegetable and Mineral” challenge for Designing Women (see previous blog).

As is won’t to happen, the day went awry.  In fact it wrote another chapter in my coming of age as a textile person.  As I sorted through my  large plastic box looking for  nice interesting pieces of silk (animal) and cotton (vegetable) dyed with the aid of some iron (mineral) , I started to feel something strange.  Almost granular. The reason?  A totally disintegrated , formerly quite large, fine woollen fabric length that had been steamed in a Trudi Pollard workshop and which was so “good” I could never decide to cut into it. It had lots of gorgeous leaves and flowers in it.

So I had to wash all the unaffected cotton fabric from the box and iron it all again….  I rewarded myself by retrieving a parcel of frozen avocado skins (and one frozen pip) from the freezer and re-dyeing some of the blander cotton pieces.  I resisted them with folding and clamping with what I call bulldog clips.  If this is not what you call them then you’ll see what they look like from the marks on the cloth.  Some have the black of the iron but some are rusty because I re-use my clips.  I’m quite pleased with them. Not that they’ll replace the beautiful length of wool….

I belong to a group of creative West Australian women called Designing Women. Their blog is http://designing-women-wa.blogspot.com.au

At yesterday’s monthly meeting we had a retrospective of her work from Rae.  It was very absorbing and I was particularly taken with her presentation of work done recently at a natural dyeing workshop in Victoria.

It inspired me to get the last piece of red cabbage out of the crisper and wrap thin slices of it in a piece of washed but otherwise not pre-treated cotton.  I steamed it for about an hour then allowed it to cool overnight with the cabbage still in it.

After washing and ironing it is paler and I’m concerned that it will fade even more over the next few days.  but I love the pale lilac colour, which went red/pink in parts as I ironed it dry.  Heat obviously plays a role in colour and I suspect that pH does too but I won’t be experimenting more with it for a while as I have to make some other pieces for a DW challenge!

The red cabbage

Red cabbage sliced

Very loosely piled into a sieve atop a saucepan of water

Very shortly after the start of steaming the colour started to seep into the fabric

Lots of colour after about an hour

Resting and cooling overnight

The cooled fabric in the morning

Before rinsing I let the fabric dry, assisting it with an iron.

I hope it will keep this colour after it
is washed but I’m not confident!

Well, that’s misleading.  It’s not a finale.  I’ll definitely be doing more….

But today was the last day of the two day WAFTA workshop on Mud Cloth with Judy Dominic. (http://www.judydominic.com/mudcloth.html)  Judy taught us a lot.  She also frankly shared what she did not know…the secrets lying in the black mud of the River Niger (running through Mali) that mean we outside of that country can’t even hope to get the same effect; we can only approximate….

The workshop was a revelation on a number of levels.  First, of course, I’d never done mud dyeing before.  I related really well to the natural dyeing concepts involved.

Second, my workshop colleagues were a well-educated bunch of women who focussed not only on the techniques being taught but also on the science underlying it.  So the questions were profound ones.  Followed by energetic pursuit, using i-pads, of the answers. And a lot of informed speculation.

Thirdly, there was a choice available to us in terms of getting an outcome. We could apply a “retention agent” to the reverse of our mud-painted fabric; or we could dry it and put it away for two weeks to 6 months to “cure”. I opted for a mixture.  The immediate gratification of seeing the work after painting it with the retention agent.  And the longer term “rewards” of putting the fabric away for 6 months.  Which means I won’t have an outcome until October 2014!!

The following are images are of fabric I painted and, after drying, applied retention agent.

After painting with retention agent and then washed

Washed and pale….but good for stitching

The next images are of fabric that’s been painted with mud but not painted with retention agent.  The objective with these is to put them away for 6 months to ensure maximum dye take up.  Results to be revealed!!

Painted but not washed

Painted and not washed

Painted and not washed

You know I’m interested in natural dyeing and that my favourite textile palette is “neutrals”, much to the distress of relatives who love brighter colour!

Well, today I had the chance to explore another form of “natural” dyeing.  Mud Cloth, and ancient fabric patterning technique practised by women in the West African country of Mali.

Tutor Judy Dominic of Ohio, USA, is in WA for WAFTA and this weekend is giving a sellout class in a modified version of the time-consuming practice.  The class of WAFTA members (and other members who were not in the class but donated mud) contributed soil from as far north as Broome and the Pilbara, as far south as Walpole and as far east as Kalgoorlie.  So we had blacks, greys, reds, oranges and yellows aplenty.

Judy showed us how to make pastes and paints and to add soy milk to help with attachment of the pigments to the fabric. Tomorrow we are going to paint the backs of our now dried samples with a retention agent (used by paper makers I understand) so we can wash them reasonably quickly.  The purist alternative is to wait six months until the pigments have fully attached to the fibres.  Too painful?

As I said to Judy, I’d like to hold out and wait six months , eschewing the ‘unnatural’ intervention to speed things up.  But wouldn’t that be hypocritical since I myself used a Thermomix to render my clay usable?

Anyway, I’m enjoying the workshop very much.  Here are some images of work in progress.  The real test is when the fabric is washed out.  If the pigments in the mud have not penetrated the fibres but are just sitting on the top of the fabric, then a very pale image indeed with result.  It may be that the mud covered fabric is now looking as good as it will ever be!

The inter-relationship between the Mud Cloth dyeing and patterning techniques of Malian women and the political upheaval in that country are every bit as fascinating as the cloth itself.  Although I know we are not rendering our cloth in anything other than a superficial parody of the techniques developed since the 1200s in Mali, I sit think I’ll do this again.

I envisage stitching on this and dyeing the background in a neutral, non-white colour. That’s if any of the pigments stay in after washing!

I’ll add more images to this post after tomorrow….