Natural Color & Textile Waste
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Context
Color is an essential feature that makes a product or piece of clothing hold emotion, trend, and value. The impact of synthetic dyes is harmful to the environment from water usage to toxic chemicals.
What dyeing methods exist to be less harmful to the environment? What materials can we use to create color? -
Upcycling and transforming
With the project Our Blueprint, Amanda Jarvis and I examined local textile waste that is sent to landfill or to be incinerated. We explored ways of upcycling and reclaiming material.
One exploration was through unweaving a sweater, dying half of if it in indigo and reweaving it back together into a new piece of cloth. Other explorations included sewing discarded items into new garments or transforming shirts into yarns for crotchet.
Natural Indigo Dyeing
Learning the process of indigo dyeing from Amanda Jarvis through our project and workshop called Our Blueprint. Today with most of the textile industry using synthetic dyes, we see less use of natural indigo dye that gives a depth and variety of blue.
For this workshop we dyed items that would be sent to landfill and had participants bring their own clothing items to upcycle through color.
Growing color through bacteria dyeing
An alternative to extracting dye is to grow dye from bacteria which naturally produces a blue/purple pigment. This pigment is called Violacein and uses the strain Janthino Bacterium Lividum.
Each fabric swatch was folded in a different way to test the pattern in which the bacteria would grow and spread.
Floral stamping and dyeing
Exploration of extracting pigment from flower petals on a variety of fabrics. We experimented with stamping, steaming, and soaking in different solutions to see if there was a difference in how well the color transferred to the fabrics. The flowers used were from local flower shops who gave us what they could not use due to size or damage.
Project team: Paige Perillat-Piratoine, June Bascaran, Sami Piercy
