By Madeline Renn
CONTRIBUTOR
Have you ever wondered how your favorite shirt was made? The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens will host “Fiber Arts Day” on Saturday, May 7 as an opportunity to find out how fibers become your shirt’s cotton, yarn and thread. Another process explained will be natural plant dyeing: how roots, petals, fruits and vegetables from the garden can be extracted to make vivid purples, greens and yellows.
Herbs, carrots, tea, coffee, indigo, beets, blackberries and even artichokes will provide raw pigments to use in the natural dyeing process. The colors extracted sometimes come as a surprise, most notably, pink comes from avocado skins and seeds. Natural dyeing is not only fun but also has environmental and health advantages. Natural dyes, because they are straight from the garden, are biodegradable and leave behind no harmful waste. They also are more cost effective, (generally) gentler on the skin, and less toxic than any synthetic dye.
The process of natural dyeing is surprisingly easy. After collecting viable and ripe plant materials, the extraction begins by chopping and grounding the material to make a paste. The paste is then steeped in purified water for an hour, strained, cooled, and combined with a (preferably natural) fixative to make it bind with the yarn or fabric. The colors that result from the process range from pastel purples to vivid greens.
The Huntington’s “Fiber Arts Day” will not only exhibit natural plant dying processes, but also demonstrations from skilled craftspeople of carding and combing fibers such as cotton and linen, spinning fibers into yarn or thread, and weaving. Head to The Huntington to find unique crafts, ideas and inspiration “stemming” from the garden.
The Huntington’s “Fiber Arts Day” is held at the Herb and Rose Gardens on Saturday, May 7. General admission, no reservation required.
