The project continues…
This week has seen more dyeing workshops for groups at Heaton Baptist Church. Spiral dyeing is such a great activity, a quick way to achieve exciting colour patterns and effects.
It’s been interesting to hear people’s ideas as they’ve added the colour, thinking about family, the energy of toddlers and so on.
We had lots of colour mixing going on too – thinking about how to mix more colours from the choices of yellow, red, turquoise, navy and brown. Sometimes only one colour will do to sum things up…
Sometimes the trickiest bit is twisting the square of fabric into a spiral – especially when there’s a little one needing a cuddle too!
Whatever, the colour combination, once the dye is applied, the fabric spiral is slipped into a plastic bag and left to ‘cure’ for 24 hours.
For the third workshop this week, with a group of young secondary school pupils, I took a different approach. First, we talked about creating a timeline of events and thinking about the mood and emotions associated with those events – how did we feel on waking up, what was it like going to school facing the strong winds of Storm Henry? The group used marker pens to draw or write out their timeline on paper, then they were asked to try and paint a piece of fabric with thickened dye, using different colours and marks to represent the feelings from their timelines. This resulted in 5 very personal and individual pieces.
All the dyes used in this project are fibre reactive type that works well with cotton fabrics. They can be mixed with a seaweed based thickener to make them into paint that can then be applied to fabric with a paintbrush, stick, sponge or other implement.
Donna Cheshire Textiles 