But with synthetic dyes, extra chemicals can trickle into the waste stream. The byproducts of industrial dyeing include aromatic solvents, formaldehyde, chlorine bleach and heavy metal salts, Ms. Kalivas said. The sooner these chemicals go out of fashion, the better.
BEFORE Sasha Duerr was a fabric artist, she was a painter. But the oil paints gave her nausea and headaches. What was the point of creating environmental art, she thought, if the toxicity of the process was making her sick? (Leave that kind of performance-art masochism to Marina Abramovic.)
In college, Ms. Duerr started investigating how to formulate her own tinctures by crushing minerals. It was an obscure pursuit — almost occult. “No one could really tell me how to do that in my department,” she said.
When she finally tracked down experts on natural colors, they turned out to be women she had known since childhood. Ms. Duerr’s parents had followed the back-to-the-land movement to a farmstead in Down East Maine. A few of their fellow travelers — farmers and craftswomen — had rediscovered natural dyes in the 1970s.
Yet some of the color-fixing agents back then were fairly nasty stuff: mineral salts like chrome and tin. These treatments are mordants (from the French, “to bite”), and they can both intensify hues and render fabrics more lightfast and washfast. In her how-to guide, “The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes,” Ms. Duerr suggests drawing milder mordant baths out of alum (aluminum sulfate), which sometimes doubles as a pickling spice.
Iron is another option, and chances are you don’t need to shop for it. Ms. Duerr produced a Ball jar that contained an orangy juice, the color of sick. “I got the nails from my husband,” she said. “He had them in a bucket in the shed, rusting away.”
One of Ms. Duerr’s apprentices, Sierra Reading, 22, scooped a metal bowl into one of big dye pots bubbling on the stove. This was onionskin water, and it had a mahogany color. A splash of the iron mordant — just a few tablespoons — hit the onion broth like cream in coffee. In an instant, the liquid had turned a deep tea green.
Mordants alone can transform a fabric. Alyssa Pitman, 32, a graduate student and teaching assistant, unzipped her sweatshirt to reveal a white T-shirt that she had tie-dyed. The dye had come from roadside weeds, the iron from old boat fittings. In time, the plant tones had faded (a phenomenon called “fugitive” color). But from the iron, an elemental ring pattern remained — a T-shirt to sell at a Richard Serra theme park.
“I find that natural dyeing makes me more aware of what’s in the environment,” Ms. Pitman said. “There are a lot of rusting things out there in the world.”
After an hour had passed, Ms. Reading wielded a pair of tongs and started pulling swatches of silk from the different dye batches. She laid them out on the white table, and began to treat the cloth with lemon juice. The fabric square from a red cabbage stew appeared turquoise at first. But as a spritz of acid permeated the fiber, parts of it turned cranberry. Five minutes later, the splotches appeared hot pink.
“The alchemy thing was no joke,” Ms. Duerr said. She shook a sprinkling of baking soda over a swatch that had been dyed in sour-grass flowers and leaves. This one went from yellow to a 1970s earth tone, the coppery orange of, say, Betty Ford’s pantsuit.
“That color was really in this year,” Ms. Duerr said. “All fashion recycles.”
IT’S nice to think that natural dyes might rejuvenate an old dress. But what if a dye garden could green up a neighborhood?
The new dye garden in Brooklyn will occupy an empty space on Bergen Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. It’s a mixed-use neighborhood, which is another way of saying that the most cheerful colors on the block come from the taxi depot across the street.
“The lot has been abandoned for the last 20 years,” said Ms. Rodrigues of the Textile Arts Center, who is one of the garden’s founders. “Nothing has been going on there.”
The artists raised $2,500 on Kickstarter for supplies and received sponsorship from a local nursery. Dozens of volunteers have been turning out on weekends to help level the lot and build raised beds. (The Textile Arts Center will share the space with Feedback Farms, an urban agriculture lab.)
Though Ms. Rodrigues now finds herself czar of 1,000 square feet of dirt, she has never really gardened before. “I’m actually a little bit overwhelmed,” she said.
In Philadelphia, Kelli Caldwell, 30, also has an abundance of dirt and a shortage of horticultural experience. “I have never grown a thing in my life,” Ms. Caldwell said. “It will be funny how this works out.”
Nonetheless, this spring she will be forging a community dye garden from a few rubble-strewn lots in the Mantua section of West Philadelphia. Once, four houses may have stood there. Yet when Ms. Caldwell arrived with volunteers last fall to clean up the site, “it looked like the rain forest,” she said. “It was like grass that was eight feet high.”
Ms. Caldwell started out with the backing of the National Association of Sustainable Fashion Designers, where she works as a project manager. But soon she was consulting with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, recruiting environmental science students from the University of Pennsylvania and enlisting neighbors from the West Philadelphia Community Center. “It’s important to work with your community if you’re going to have a community garden,” she said.
Ms. Caldwell would like to try coloring infinity scarves with indigo and madder. “I am a purple girl,” she said. But she hasn’t just dipped her toe into this endeavor; she has jumped into the crucible.
“I have plants all over my house now,” she said. “This Saturday, I’m going to the Home Grown Institute conference for gardening, so I will be able to have some insight into this whole urban agricultural thing. It’s really been a life-changing experience.”
For Ms. Caldwell, it seems, the dye took.
Planting for Color(s)
THE madder plant (Rubia tinctorum) doesn’t get over on looks or charm. As a dye, ground-up madder root can produce a spectacular “fire-engine red,” said Pamela Feldman, a textile artist and teacher. But “the plants that give you really good dye are not attractive.”
In the boulevard garden of Ms. Feldman’s Chicago home, madder behaves like an ill-tempered bedstraw. “It’s prickly, and it has a little bit of a white flower and a purple berry,” she said. Weeding around it is a nuisance: Ms. Feldman wears long sleeves and gloves. And its tendrils need constant burying. And though you can stint a little on watering, “you have to keep it in the ground for three to five years before you dig it up.”
Excruciatingly slow knitters may want to buy some time by growing madder from seed. Everyone else, Ms. Feldman said, should purchase starts. Sandy Mush Herb Nursery, in Leicester, N.C., sells ready-to-go madder plants for $5 (828-683-2014 or sandymushherbs.com).
With its groovy line drawings and listings for 1,600 plants, the delightful catalog doesn’t look as if it has changed much since the last dye revival of the 1970s. Yes, the order form feels dilatory. But you’ll only need a single order of dyer’s woad seed (Isatis tinctoria, $1). And that may be too much. States across the West quarantine this biennial mustard for its territorial ambitions. Woad contains indigo for dyeing — and allelopathic compounds that taint the soil where other plants might grow.
“If you let it go to flower, it will cause havoc,” Ms. Feldman said. “The first-year leaves give the best color. Then get rid of it!”
For a blue without the blues, true indigo (Indigofera tinctoria) might be a better bet. Alas, the perennial shrub didn’t do much for the Philadelphia dye house Blue Red Yellow on first try. True indigo likes a long growing season, said Elissa Meyers, a dye artist. “And we got started a little bit late.” (The plants were squatting in a vacant lot in South Philadelphia.)
At a new spot in the Schuylkill Center Organic Community Garden, the dyers will be trying Japanese indigo plants (Persicaria tinctoria or Polygonum tinctorium). “We found that transplanting didn’t work very well for us,” said Mira Sophia Adornetto, a founder of Blue Red Yellow. “This summer, we’ll direct-seed them.”
The Philadelphia crew got their seeds from the Indiana artist and indigo specialist Rowland Ricketts. His Web site (indigrowingblue.com) includes a handy guide to cultivating Japanese indigo, which he appears to be harvesting by the kilo. For just a taste — one-tenth of a gram — Fedco Seeds, in Maine, charges $2.20 (207-873-7333 or fedcoseeds.com). Hooked? Move on to the hard stuff: dyer’s coreopsis (Coreopsis tinctoria) for bronzes (0.3 gram for $1) or dyer’s broom (Genista tinctoria) for greens (0.2 gram for $1.50).
Ms. Adornetto sees the garden as a color lab. “Every time we dye something, whether we get the expected results or not, I’m just astounded by how beautiful it is,” she said. The one plant that will never yield a lovely hue is the seed you don’t sow.
Reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/garden/a-new-generation-discovers-grow-it-yourself-dyes.html
