Thursday night, Julie hosted a fun backyard dyeing party for the students from the Advanced Natural Dyeing class. During the class we weren’t able to get the zinc lime indigo vat going properly, so Julie offered to have us over when she got one going successfully at home.

It was the perfect night to be outside eating fresh baked bread and cheese, drinking iced tea and experimenting with indigo. There were two indigo vats that Julie had going. One was a zinc lime indigo vat (you can see the ‘flower’ below that forms on top of the vat when it is ready for dyeing) and the other was a natural fermentation vat. We found the natural fermentation vat to be deeper in colour and I felt like I could try to do this type of indigo vat on my own. It was pretty exciting to try out other types of indigo. What is it about indigo blue?

I did some Itajime Shibori, which is created by simply folding and clamping your fabric. It’s so simple, but the results are stunning. I’m really happy with how my square window panes turned out and it was my first time trying to do triangular folds. I’m not too sure what I’m doing with these indigo pieces but I’m sure you’ll see them re-appear in another form in the future.

We also set up a pot of cochineal with lime juice, which seems to give some brilliant red results to the yarns that Susan and Julie were dyeing. We tried mixing cochineal and log wood into another pot and got a pretty purplish colour.

I over-dyed a few pieces that will go into my natural dyed quilt. I think I’m ready to assemble the quilt top and back. I can’t wait to see how all these dyed samples look together.

We stayed outside dyeing and chatting until it got too dark to see what we were doing and the mosquitos started to bite. We missed Carolanne and Margie that night, who couldn’t make it, but we talked about another get together since we had so much fun.

We ended the night with a raspberry pie that I got at Mabel’s on Roncesvalles. YUM. I’m plotting going back for another one that I might try to eat all by myself.

Check out Arounna’s photos here and Julie’s photos here. The top photo in this post is by Brian who took some great shots while I was unfolding my fabric.

p.s. Julie opened up a little shop on etsy to sell some limited run natural dyed accessories and yarns!

Here it is, my indigo-dyed, shibori dress. I’m so in love with it.

When choosing the pattern for this project, I wanted to choose a fairly simple dress that had sleeves to show off the shibori pattern. Rather than try to cover the entire dress with the pattern, I focused on having it clustered around the bottom of all the pieces. To get the specific placement, I cut out all my pattern pieces out of white muslin, serged all the edges and did the shibori right on each dress piece.

The pattern is dress “V” from Stylish Dress Book 2. This is actually the first dress I’ve made from this book. I’m just finishing off a second one this week. Melinda made this particular dress a few months ago, so I already knew how cute it was. Choosing the contrasting fabric to go with it was difficult. I’m pretty sure I pulled every navy bolt of fabric off the shelf before finally settling on this floral print from Windham. I also made fabric covered buttons using this fabric for the placket. Having matching buttons always makes a project feel polished.

This dress was simple to make. It has lots of pretty gathering on the neckline and sleeves. I did mess up one part though. I failed to add seam allowance to the placket down the centre, so I had an extra big hole down the centre of the dress. To fix it, I just created a little centre pleat below the placket which brought together the edges of the placket hole. Mistakes often lead to creative solutions, so I always try to avoid getting too upset when I realize that I’ve done something ‘wrong’.

This is my favourite dress so far. I’m really, really proud of it. I definitely want to keep experimenting with natural dyeing fabrics to make more clothing. The soft, uneven texture looks so beautiful. I even have the beginnings of an idea to do a quilt with only natural dyed fabrics.

The last day of the Natural Dyeing class was all about indigo dyeing. I’ve always admired Japanese shibori dyeing, so I couldn’t wait to try it out in this class. Shibori is a method of creating patterns on fabric during the dyeing process by binding, stitching, folding, twisting, or compressing it.

I got the idea to dye fabric for a dress from Melissa and pre-cut and serged all my pieces beforehand. This way I could plan exactly where the shibori would be located on the dress. I used a pure white muslin rather than a natural coloured one to keep the blue clearer. To create my design I placed screws (of various sizes and shapes) underneath my fabric and wrapped each one up tightly with heavy upholstery thread. This is a fairly labour intensive type of shibori, but I really liked the circular patterns it creates.

Deeper blue colours are achieved through repeated immersion into the dye vat. I was able to dip my pieces into the vat four times. It’s a bit hard to tell what the colour will dry as, it is always much darker when it’s wet. When I unwrapped all the screws, several of them had transferred rust marks onto the fabric which I actually really like. The fabric dried to a really nice blue and I even like the slightly uneven colouring, it gives it a vintage feel.

Shibori tights? Yes, please!

Next post – the finished dress!

Natural dyeing is something I’ve been wanting to try for a very long time. The idea of one day growing things in my backyard that I can harvest and then dye my own fabrics with is incredibly exciting. When I browse through seed catalogs, I’m always taking note of the plants that are candidates for my future dye garden. When I caught wind that Julie Sinden had lots of amazing experience in the field, I set the wheels in motion to set up a class as quickly as possible.

The class was pretty magical. It opened up a whole new world of possibility with textiles and sewing for me. Just the history alone of where these natural dyes came from is so interesting. Also, natural dyes are not exactly what I thought – you can’t actually use beets to dye fabric or yarn, as it won’t last and neither will turmeric. Pomegranate skins will give you a yellow-ish colour, not pink or red. Rhubarb root, mushrooms, oak leaves and walnut husks are all possible dyes that I’m interested in trying. I’m cooking up some future dyeing projects for myself already.

The last day of the class we did indigo dyeing which is a post all on its’ own.

Just look at all this yummy colour!