Location: The Foyle Studio, Tate St. Ives
Learn how to use locally foraged seaweeds and plants to create bundle dyed organic uk-grown peace silk cloth and block printing inks to create a collection of gift cards.
This 3 hour workshop starts with an intro to natural dyeing and the bundle dye process, a demo of a couple of different bundle dye techniques, followed by the practical session. Next we steam the bundles to release their colours and imprint the organic British grown silk. During this time we can have a 10 min tea break and continue with further theory on natural dyeing process before making up some wild crafted inks to use to decorate gift cards.
In the final part of the class we will remove our silks from the steamer, finish them with an iron mordant and go through the finishing instructions.
We end with a closing circle in which each person gets to present what they have
made and we have some group discussion.
Each person has a 50 x 140 cm length of organic British grown silk to make into a scarf and a set of 5 eco-craft gift cards and envelopes.
All of the required materials and equipment will be provided and included in the cost of teh ticket. You may wish to bring gloves or an apron or wear clothes you do not mind getting messy, although this is not a particularly messy class, so this is not essential. A notebook or camera to catalogue your creative journey may also be of use. If you have any additional flowers and leaves you would like to bring to try bundle dyeing with, you are welcome.
Our ethos is to reconnect people with Nature using creativity as a conduit and to detoxify the creative spheres of our culture.
It has been said that people living in urban spaces spend up to a staggering 90% of their lives indoors, disconnected from nature, plants, animals, the earth and other people.
By using plant dyes as a medium for creative journeys, we allow people to develop their eco-literacy, enabling them to read and interact with the landscape in a new and interesting way. Which can have a significantly soothing and rejuvenating effect on an emotional and physical level.
We are passionate about the environment, and hope that through our work we can offer a viable working model of what a sustainable creative practice looks like.
Our work is concerned with dyeing and printing for textile and paper based mediums, with interest to those from art, design, craft, print, textiles and fashion communities.
It is through developing a relationship with the materials we use to create and craft things - where they come from, how they are grown, processed, used and put back into the earth at the end of their useful life cycle - that we can we build a greater understanding of how they are made, what they are made of, and their impact on people and the environment.