Follow Julie Beeler’s journal as she documents the activities on her flower farm Bloom & Dye, her natural dyeing results in her art studio, and showcases her students creations from her workshops.
To get natural colors to affix to natural fibers you need to mordant your fibers. The type of mordant you use will inform your dye results and can often modify a color, resulting in a range of colors across different fiber types and mordants.
Read MoreThe plant world is a rich resource of color, which can be extracted from flowers, leaves, bark, roots, fruits and seeds. Bundle dyeing is one of the simplest ways to achieve a rich diversity of colors and textures. Follow these simple steps to create a colorful and impactful bundle dye.
Read MoreThe 2019 flower season officially begun with our first CSA flower bouquet delivery on April 5. I documented each delivery we made and updated this journal entry as we moved through the season. I loved seeing the variety of flowers, colors of blooms and the shear flower power we grew. Hope you enjoy!
Read MoreThe flush of summer flowers was a thrill! As I dream of summer blooms on this glorious winter day knowing spring is just around the corner I thought it was time to publish all the beauty from our 2019 Summer CSA bouquet season. Enjoy!
Read MoreI was recently introduce to Catherine Craig who for the past 16 years has been working with a team in Madagascar to develop a program that meshes tropical forest conservation with the production of a unique textile, cocoon silk, made from cocoons spun by endemic species of silk moths.
Read MoreThe UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley, CA hosted Michel Garcia, chemist and natural dyer from France, to host a two-day workshop exploring natural mordants and dyes. Michel has done tremendous work in this area to explore plants and tannins as a sustainable method for natural dyeing rather than relying on minerals for mordanting. He demonstrated 14 different combinations yielding diverse colors on wool.
Read MoreI created the Mushroom Color Atlas as a resource and reference so you can explore the chromatic universe of fungi through the spectrum of colors naturally produced by dye mushrooms. But it is also the start of a journey and a point of departure, introducing you to the kaleidoscopic fungi kingdom and our connection to it. There is a long history and tradition from around the world of using fungi for dyeing and Dominique Cardon, in her book Natural Dyes, Sources, Tradition, Technology and Science, traces it back to as early as the 15th century. Our contemporary tradition is owed to Miriam Rice, who experimented, discovered, documented and spread the word about fungi as dyes for fibers and paper. The title of Arleen Rainis Bessette & Alan E Bessette’s book The Rainbow Beneath My Feet captures the essence of dyeing with mushrooms and the unlimited possibilities of the colors that can be created.
Read MoreWorking with fresh leaf indigo grown on my flower farm is one of those simple pleasures in life. In the depths of winter on these long grey days I have often reflected back to the fact that I grew these plants from seed to color and eagerly await the first indigo harvest in summer 2019.
Indigo has always been magical to me and I have dyed with it for many years in many forms across many types of fabrics and fibers, always yielding different results. I returned from a trip to Japan where I studied indigo and finally dug into the science behind it, learned some botany and chemistry, and finally understood how the ‘indigo’ that we see is actually created at a scientific level. With my new knowledge in hand I was ready for my first indigo harvest.
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