Natural Dye: the begining

My third craft is going to be natural dyeing! I'm so happy to have discovered this art while connecting with various people on Instagram. I come across Rebecca Desnos and as soon as I understood her 100% natural approach to dyeing I got hooked. I bought her eBook, I think, 1 hour after it was launched!

What I've realised, once I've started reading, is that natural dye is a slow and incredibly satisfying process. I love how time is crucial for each step to work at its best. Therefore, I've decided to work on this skill during the summer, June-August while I'll also be concentrating on other skills, as I want to enjoy each phase of this beautiful journey.

Before even start dyeing I had to bath the fabrics and strings in soya milk three times! The first bath took 12 hours. Luckily we had some sunny days recently and I managed to soak the whole lot over night and the next day I dried, soaked, dried, soaked and dried again, everything, in the sun, while the girls were playing in the garden. Win-win situation!

Above you can see I split the fabrics and strings in 2 pots and 1 bucket, which wasn't big enough for the cotton sheet , so I ended up using the old baby bath that I was about to give away to charity. The fabric was flowing in milk!

I forgot to mentioned that before starting the soya baths, I've weighted the banana silk, the cotton sheet and the 3mm string on my notebook so I could work out the soy/water ratio for the bath. Also I'll need the weight once I start dyeing.

For now the fabrics and rope will rest for at list one week before I'll be able to start the best part: dyeing!

In the mean time I've been collecting dried flowers, avocado stones and skins, various tea bags, onion skins, leaves and pine cones. See you soon with natural dyeing progress.