Friday 28 November 2008

In the Woods




No apologies for some more about our woods! Walking in our local woods, or on the hillsides, has to be one of the great privileges of living in such a beautiful area of Britain as this is. And being able to do so without having to get in a car to get there just adds to the experience.


The way the woods are managed for wildlife means that there is always uncleared timber and wild areas; decaying stumps covered in mosses and lichens; ferns and fungi pushing up among the old leaves.


The little river at Pwll y Wrach makes a constantly damp environment, keeping the woods lush and overgrown, in contrast to Park Wood on the other side of the hill. Park Wood is drier and crisp to walk through in the Autumn when all the leaves have fallen.

Thursday 27 November 2008

To Dye or Not to Dye



I work with organic wool. It is produced with minimal environmental impact and many must think that to add another process, such as dyeing, can only be detrimental. We have become very used to having colour applied to anything and everything, in whatever shade or tone we care to dictate. We want it to last forever even though we may discard the item immediately. Our textiles mustn't fade, but we change our interiors and wardrobes at will and send unwanted items to landfill.

I am not a chemist; I am a craft dyer, hopefully in the full sense of the word. These are my thoughts and ponderings from that perspective and I do not claim to have a full working knowledge of all the dyeing processes. But I am fascinated by the stories of colour and its development and use by the human race. As I look around this room, everything - from paper to ceramics, chairs, plastic, walls, everything - is coloured artificially.

In history, colour was precious. The best, fastest and brightest were the preserve of the Church and the rich. It wasn't all good news with these colours - arsenic, lead and mercury were just some of the natural ingredients used, with inevitable consequences for the dyers and sometimes the customer.

Humans love to be awash with colour. A walk down any High Street will show that. But do we really see it in such a cacophony? Many years ago I spent a couple of months in Romania, before the overthrow of the Communist government. The first thing to strike me on our return to Heathrow was the colourfulness - adverts, signage, clothing, cars - everything. It shouted! And it was quite overwhelming. It took me very much by surprise as I really hadn't noticed any lack of colour during our stay in a rural Romanian town.

But to get that amount of colour into everything we use demands additional and, quite often, toxic processes. Apparently, European dye manufacturers are having to move their production from Europe to countries where Health and Safety and environmental regulation isn't so expensive to apply - maybe because it is not so strict? It can be extremely difficult for the average consumer to find out what goes into the production of their textiles - but do many actually care enough? Have we ever thought about it enough?


Low impact, water based synthetic dyes are now available. Easy to apply and they leave the dye-vat exhausted (the fibre takes up all the colour). But still derived from oil? Do they still need to be tested on animals?

We decided to use plant based dyes. We enjoy the challenge of working with them, developing the skills, and the links with the past as much as the colours we obtain. But they need a mordant - a metal salt - to affix the colour to fibre. Organic standards allow Alum and a small percent of iron. And what about the land taken up by growing crops for dyeing? Shouldn't it be used for food? The demands on land now are for fuel crops and fibre producing plants too; dye plants are just one more. But the waste from the plants can be composted. And some plants grow on land unsuitable for food. The colours may not be quite as fast as synthetic dyes but they do not disappear at the first hint of a wash or a sunbeam. And they always attract attention for their subtlety, their gentleness and depth.

There is a place for both types of dye according to the end use of the product it is applied to. Maybe what we should be doing is minimising our use of colour, using small touches with all the undyed and natural shades wherever possible.

As far as textiles go - I aim to do just that. Wool and other protein (animal) fibres are available in many natural shades from white and cream through to almost black. Small details in dyed colours, carefully placed, can really shine out. I heard of someone who decorated her house very plainly but lit it by occasional brightly coloured textiles and painting, causing them to have a maximum impact.

Colour is special. Good colour is expensive and precious.

Wednesday 26 November 2008

Not the Blues

I'm sometimes asked if I have any blue wool - not often, people don't seem to notice, or they don't say. A friend of mine breeds Wensleydale sheep and I dye the yarn for her; she is a 'blue' person so I set up an indigo vat to explain. The photo below is the surface of the fermentation vat, which I think is so pretty - much prettier than the blue wool!
Anyway, by using indigo (or woad) you get a completely different set of colours to the other mordant dyes. And they just don't go together - well, I don't think so, and my friend agreed. Overdye using indigo on weld for greens for example, and you get emeralds and spring grass colours - quite bright - instead of olives and bronzy greens. So she is going to have to learn to do her own blues! And as I am not a 'blue' person, it was easy to make a decision not to include the blues. Some of the greys you can obtain have a bue-ish tint, especially when next to certain other colours.

All the other colours seem to reflect the environment we live in - obvious really I suppose!
Hay on Wye is twinned withTimbuktu and earlier this year some Mali - an leaders were in town and they were just so stunning in their Indigo robes and white headress with such dark skin - amazing!
That's where indigo belongs.


Indigo

Thursday 9 October 2008

Pwll y Wrach


Pwll y Wrach - Witches Pool - is a wooded nature reserve on the edge of Talgarth at the foot of the Black Mountains; and it's in walking distance. It is a tree lined valley with a little river at the bottom and a voluminous waterfall higher up the river, falling into the Witches Pool. In the spring there are carpets of anemones and ransomes, bluebells and sweet woodruff, and of course, all those amazing ferns. It's always green and cool and shady and damp in summer, and changing leaves and intriguing fungi in autumn. There are high rocky outcrops and fallen trees, left for the wildlife.
It has struck me though, that its very easy to miss the detail. The countryside can be quite monotone - varying shades of greens or browns, but punctuated by bright glimpses and short-lived sweeps of contrast. In the spring I started to think there may be an idea to explore here. Historically, colours were far more valued than now and carefully used. Using colours, especially the more precious ones such as Madder, in small quantities with undyed yarns may even make them stand out more........And the textures are there - in barks and plantlife, and rocks and stone - but easily overlooked

Violets are typical examples of overlooked detail - their tiny short stemmed flowers hidden among the dead leaves in spring.



Design Wales Trends Seminar - and a Dilemma

Today I went to the Trend Seminar put on by Design Wales for anyone involved in design in Wales. This was in Cardiff, they also hold similar ones in the north of Wales. It's a free event so nothing to lose by going, and a free lunch into the bargain. www.designwales.org

The first presentation was by Design Wales about intellectual property in design (copyright, trade marks etc) and was really interesting. Some things I was aware of, others not, and the whole issue seems a potential minefield. It was suggested that one keeps all research and design work relating to a project for example, not just the finished design, as proof if a conflict arises. (Will have to dig some bits of paper back out the rubbish then!)
www.ipo.gov.uk has loads of info.

The second item was an overview of 2009/10 trends by the CEO of a company called Mudpie Ltd. (they have a website but you have to subscribe to it to get any information) I hadn't been to anything like this before and was Totally Unprepared for my reactions! As she was running through the trends and pages and photos of the categories, I started to feel quite overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it all and the marketing language of getting the consumer to buy, buy, buy. The pictures of young children on catwalks, beautifully dressed in miniature fashions, had me feeling rather uneasy. The idea of fashion changing in shops every 6 weeks and the waste that must generate, the total reliance on the consumer consuming......Have I been spending too much time in my rural idyll? I had a real conflict as we were discussing the day on the way home (I went with my daughter Emily, who is trying to make her way designing and making clothing in hemp and locally woven wool and such like). Are we not part of this world too, wanting people to buy what we do? Is this something I want to be part of? I'd expected to come away with ideas and inspiration and feeling like I may have a direction, not considering dropping the whole idea and hiding in the hills.

At lunch time the Soil Association representative, Lee Holdstock, had arrived as he was doing the first afternoon presentation on what constitutes organic textiles. Lee had been my main contact when I was considering certification and helped get the dyes approved, so it was encouraging to be able to have a chat to him. His presentation was based on cotton production, using the Aral Sea destruction as an illustration. I read about this area a number of years ago - it was one of the first things to get me thinking about textiles and how we produce and use them. He also said how the market sector for organic textiles was growing - up from 1/2% to 1% - so here we are, a many times micro set-up in a micro sector! No wonder it's so uphill!

At shows we have people coming to talk to us about their travels in far flung places - Nepal, Tibet, India, Africa, - and the textile crafts people they have met. Last Sunday a man shared some of his experiences in health and safety teaching in India, where he had seen people die in Indigo vats. But he had also met Bedouin tribesmen who refused to use synthetic indigo as it was too fast; natural indigo would rub off onto their skin, so their garments became a part of them. I wonder sometimes, have we lost something in our quests for more and cheaper, and the consistent perfection of colour and fibre and weave and twist?

Anyway - enough of all that! I'll try to get some more photos uploaded, maybe even some of my bunnies.