this last week has been a dyeing week.
(actually, now it was the week before last - i’ve been in bed for a week with tonsillitis. was hoping to send this out on the new moon…)
i’ve been collecting onion skins for awhile, my own and also from my local organic veg shop, harvest workers coop. since starting dyeing i’ve collected lots of onion skins from lots of different places - from the buddhafield cafe, from the kitchen at the green earth awakening, from shops, kitchens i’ve cooked in. onions are everywhere! it’s a very abundant dye, giving lots of colour. you can use the bath again and again and it will keep giving beautiful tones, and so i often think of onion skin dye as the generosity dye. its apt really, as yellow is the colour of ratnasambhava, who is the buddha associated with the qualities of generosity and abundance. another quality he is associated with is creativity, and so it has felt right to start with studying him as the start of a year long personal project i am doing, about the 5 buddha mandala. more on that in another letter!
this week i’ve been concentrating on the different stages of dyeing, doing a bit of experimentation in dyeing wooden beads, dyeing some groups of mini skeins (20g each instead of 100g), dyeing some cloth for making quilts or clothes, and also dyeing some napkins and table runners i got from a charity shop to be used as shrine or altar cloths.
my dyeing practice usually has to take place in the evening, once alba has gone to bed, as i use chemicals, like aluminium sulphate, which, while they wouldn’t kill you, are still somewhat toxic, and there are also lots of hot pans around. so it’s pottering around in the evening light for me, weighing and mixing things, dipping and soaking, squeezing water out of fabric, trying not to spill on the floor, alone with my potions.
it is a slow slow process. usually i can only do one step of the process per evening, so, like with meditation, i need to be able to maintain a thread, a continuity and faithfulness to what i am doing. so often i want to hurry along, get to the end result so i can feel satisfied and like i’ve achieved something, but i’ve learnt, over the years of dyeing and making, that rushing is the way to get bad results! i have always been a bit slapdash, and dyeing has really made me notice the effects that it can have. when i started dyeing i wouldn’t scour my fabric or wool, because it felt boring and slow, i just wanted to make colour! i’d do a half hearted job on mordanting, rush onto the colour, and then feel sad with my final result.
in the last year or so, as i’ve experienced some deep unfurling of my spiritual practice, i am noticing that my dyeing practice has really stepped up. this week i spent 2 or 3 evenings preparing fabric, scouring, soaking in a tannin bath, and then in an alum one, and i found a deep sense of contentment in the preparation, the unseen work that contributes to beautiful colour. if i can link it to spiritual practice more, often people talk about ‘conditions’, having the right supportive conditions for their practice to flourish, to grow, and for many years, i neglected that, i wanted fruits of practice immediately. if i didn’t get results quickly, then i would give up. i didn’t want to put thought into or change how i was doing things, i just wanted to do things. but as i’ve grown older and reflected more, i have come to see that conditions are the bedrock, and without good conditions, without reflecting on how you are and what you do in the world, you can only get so far. so i always got colour on the fabric i was dyeing, right from the beginning, but it was dull, washed out quickly, faded. beautiful in its own way of course, and i still have some of those fabrics and work with them, but, with different conditions, they could have been more.
this week, after scouring (twice!), having a tannin bath, then an alum one, and then finally a layer of colour over all that, i pulled from the dye pot some of the most vivid and alive colour i have ever made. i’m not sure what i will use it for, maybe some sort of clothing, but i feel like i’ve moved into a new stage of my dyeing practice.
i’ll add some definitions here:
scouring is where you are trying to remove as much of the inground dirt and waxes and oil from the machines it was made on from the fabric as possible. you bring the fabric to a gentle boil with some washing soda and washing up liquid for an hour. then you rinse, and are ready to go to the next step.
a tannin bath is where you soak the fabric in a tannin rich liquid as a base layer, and to help the dye stick - also know as mordanting. different tannins create little to more colour, mostly in shades of beige to dark brown. some tannins can be used alone to get colour, like oak leaves, or avocado stones. i’ve always understood this as an optional step, alum works well alone, but have been reading about tannin baths giving more depth to colour.
an alum bath is another layer of mordant. aluminum sulphate or aluminum acetate, depending on the fiber, is a manmade chemical mordant, as opposed to the naturally occurring tannin. again, it helps create the chemical bond between the dye and the fabric, a jigsaw piece joining them together.
t.i.l.l - things i’ve loved lately
as a big sci fi fan, and also someone whose trying to read less white authors writing about white people, i’ve been getting into afrofuturism. it’s defined as 'a cultural aesthetic and a philosophy that reimagines African tradition and Black future through speculative work and critical theory' in an article i read by Megan Anderson. this seems to be the widest definition of it, elsewhere it’s defined as a sub-genre of sci-fi. i recently read a novella called ‘binti’, by nnedi okorafor, which came out in 2015 and won both hugo and nebula awards. it’s about a young girl being the first woman in her family to leave her planet to study mathematics at a prestigious university. i loved the world building in it, and the exploration of identity in it. the character descriptions made me realise how much i imagine characters are white in books, and how much work i still have to do in diversifying my own mind.
along the same lines, i’ve been really into this band called drexciya. they were an electronic duo from detroit, who made a series of albums over 10 years, set in an undersea civilisation called drexciya. i got into them after reading this article about an underwater memorial to the victim of slavery in the atlantic. i’ve been listening to the first two albums on repeat for awhile, soaking them in, and i think it’s time to move onto the third. this article is also really interesting, and has some of the artwork that been made inspired by the music and its story.
in a list of no particular order: the lighter mornings, birdsong on my way to work, late night sewing, warm cuddles from alba in the morning, laughing loudly with co workers, listening to voice notes from beloved ones, making cake, eating chocolate in bed, driving through woodlands with the sun at that particular perfect angle, jasper getting into the car from a home-ed meet up smelling strongly of woodsmoke, singing along to 21 by adele in the car with alba, late night chats with sam when both the kids are in bed.
well, that’s probably enough for now. i’d love to hear back from people, if you read any of the articles and want to chat about them, or share things you think i’d be interested in, please get in touch! and if there’s anyone you think would like this letter, then please forward it on :)
lots of love ruth