Making the dye pots up were a lot of fun. It was fascinating to see the colour start to emerge from the plant materials, some very quickly and others over a period of weeks.
I used iron pots for stronger dye colours and experimented with a mix of dried plant material and freshly collected.
Making the organic indigo vat was fascinating. Balancing the vat took a little practice but it’s become one of my favorite processes to come from the whole project!
Tricky to film the yarn dyeing as it takes two hands to keep everything under control!
The indigo vat was really interesting as the yarn changes colour in front of your eyes. I let it sit in the vat for less than a minute in a DIY holder to stop it from touching the sludge at the bottom of the pot. Once the yarn was lifted out the colour changed from a yellow shade to green/blue almost immediately.
The eucalyptus bark gave a warm tan shade which was perfect as I planned to weave plenty of sandy beach scenes!
Nettles, eucalyptus leaves, eucalyptus bark and alder cones ready to be heated gently before being left to cool overnight.
The smell of the eucalyptus being heated was incredible. It brought back memories of driving along the great ocean road with @lollywobbles in 2017, the windows of our van down, the wild southern ocean on our left and the eucalypt forests on our right.
This type of connection to place was so important when I was deciding on the materials for my Seasons Of The Sea project. I hope that when my work is on display @somersethouse the visitors will be able to see this connection and that my work will hopefully invoke memories from their lives too.
The link to my KoFi fundraising page is https://www.ko-fi.com/arratextiles if you’d like to help me get to Collect Open 2022!