Foraging Prep – What Excites Me?
The foraging aspect of my project was insanely exciting to me, but also a little daunting. I have never done much foraging in the past, and while I have been anxious to get into it ever since arriving on the Evergreen campus, I haven’t quite known where to start. Writing up a list and doing research on local forage for natural dyes was a great way for me to get into it. I poured over book after book, discovering more and more plants and more and more projects to use them in. The following is the list of natural dye plants that I compiled from this research, most of which I can find locally right on the Evergreen campus.
Natural Dyes that Excite Me:
- flowers (daffodils, dandelions, cherry blossoms, etc.)
- onion skins*
- avocadoes*
- tea*
- bracken fern
- rhubarb (used as a mordant as well)*
- blackberries (salmonberries too?)
- sorrel
- tansy
- nettle
- alder
- queen anne’s lace
- ivy
- mahonia
- horsetail
*starred items are dyes that will not be foraged and will instead be obtained from local farmers’ markets, co-ops, and stores as a last resort
Foraging Adventure
The Evergreen woods was the perfect place to begin my foraging journey. Not only was this a place that I had formed a deep connection with and had grown to know and love, but many of these natural dyes were already heavily available within these woods. So on a sunny afternoon, I set out with my basket and pocket knife for my first foraging adventure.
This was my final basket after a long day of foraging, minus the dandelions and daffodils that I had foraged separately at a later time. I was really excited with all of my finds and had taken some of my natural dye books with me to do research on the trails when encountering new plants I was unsure of. This entire process felt like I was creating an entirely new relationship with the woods; I wanted to be cautious of how much I was taking and how I was treating each plant when harvesting. It’s very easy to get excited when running across a plant for foraging and to forget that this plant is a living being as well. Treating the woods with respect is an important piece to remember on any foraging adventure.
Produces a light to mustard yellow 
Produces a rusty orange 
Produces a coffee stain brown 
Can produce a variety of browns, oranges, and greens 
Produces a lovely yellow
Mordant Harvest
Later in the week on a visit back home, I was also lucky to be able to harvest some rhubarb leaves from my family’s farm. Rhubarb leaves, while toxic when consumed, are used in dyeing as a natural mordant, a fixative that helps dyes better connect to the fiber (more mordant research will be shared next week!). I was thankful that rhubarb was growing on my family’s farm and my parents allowed me to harvest it, as I would’ve a hard time finding the leaves anywhere else because of their toxicity.
Instagram Inspiration
As phones often do, my phone seemed to pick up on the fact that I was starting a project surrounding the use of natural dyes, and it surprised me one morning with an ad on Instagram for naturally dyed Vans products. Upon doing further research on the subject, I found the story of Karla Almendra, a textile artist from Mexico. She had partnered with Vans to create a number of naturally dyed Vans products, with the sole purpose of keeping the natural art of textile dyeing alive. She emphasized the unique qualities of every piece created, how she never knows how the piece will turn out until she’s unfolding it after the dyeing process. The story was quite beautiful to me, but it was also quite inspiring.
The key featured item that Almendra created was a pair of naturally dyed white Vans shoes. She dyed them through the use of dried flower petals which she laid out on a piece of cloth and then wrapped around the shoes, tying it all together with string. After carrying out the dyeing process, she unwrapped the shoes to reveal a beautiful array of colors, as seen above.
This project completely inspired me. I had wanted to find some special bigger project for myself to attempt during the quarter, and this felt like the perfect one to take on. So almost instantly, I went out in search of a pair of cheap, white shoes. I found these Keds at a local Ross, which was a lot cheaper than a new pair of Vans would’ve been for me. I am very excited to figure out how to dye them!
But that’s one of my problems. I’m not entirely sure how to dye these shoes. The Vans website doesn’t share Almendra’s recipe for dyeing, and Almendra, herself, does not have a website or place where she would share any tips or wisdom. This means I’ll have to figure out how to dye them on my own.
I have decided to try a version of bundle dyeing for the shoes. Developed by a modern-day textile artist from Australia, India Flint, this process uses dyes from fresh flowers and plants to infuse colors into whatever material is being dyed. It involves the scattering of flower petals and other plant material across a fiber piece and then bundling it up in a specific pattern or roll. It is the closest dyeing technique I can find to what Almendra did with the shoes; it just adds the aspect of bundling the fiber up around a pair of shoes.
Because of risks of damaging the shoes through the process of hot bundle dyeing, I will be attempting the cold dyeing method, where the shoes will be tied up in a plastic bag and left to sit for at least a week, if not longer. I am hoping that my research has paid off and I will have a nicely dyed pair of shoes by the end of this quarter.