This piece will be exhibited in Unit Twelve’s new exhibition (Surface) Pattern 27th April- 26th August 2017.
I’m also running a natural dye workshop at the gallery on Saturday 29th July where you can create lovely patterns on cloth using foraged plant materials.
This summer I am running a three day course at the lovely West Dean College, 30 May 2016 to 2 June 2016. Find out more here.
Ruth Singer. The Beauty of Stains
Explore a range of slow, thoughtful textile practices to create cloth with meaning. Experiment with local plants and simple rust dyeing to create eco prints on natural and vintage cloth. Introduce hand stitch with fabric manipulation and trapunto quilting to add texture and structure.
Alongside my Narrative Threads exhibition at the National Centre for Craft & Design, I am running a weekend masterclass on 9th & 10th January 2016 (rescheduled from December). Spend the weekend immersed in creative, slow, experimental techniques inspired by my work. The workshops include simple, experimental natural dye techniques, embroidery and using found objects. You can create a series of samples, pieces to incorporate into other work or art textile pieces to frame.
Day 1
Our first task of the weekend will be to manipulate and colour cloth using natural dyes, plants, food, rust and inks. We will experiment with shibori dye, hand painting colour and creating patterns from rusty metal to create original and exciting patterns and marks on cloth. We will also dye threads and other materials to use on day 2.
Day 2
Using the cloth we have created in day one (or purchased on the day if you have not attended day 1) we will look at using simple embroidery stitches to create marks and patterns on the dyed cloth. We will experiment with layering and cutting away the fabrics to create new textures. We will also explore ways of incorporating found objects into our work to add depth and narrative to the pieces.
£50 per day or £95 for the weekend, including basic materials, with additional materials available to purchase at the workshop. Book with NCCD on 01529 308710 info@nationalcraftanddesign.org.uk.
I recently completed a short project for Sustainable Harborough using natural dyes and local plants to create a textile wall hanging for the local library. They asked me to propose a workshop for a town centre activity day which local people could join in with and result in something attractive and informative for display at the end.
I devised a simple natural dye workshop using easy, non-toxic natural dyes and local plants to create eco-prints on reclaimed silk from an old wedding dress. Each person taking part chose their own flowers and leaves to create bundles with and then added their tied bundle to either turmeric or beetroot / tea dye pot. Participants came back an hour or more later to unwrap and reveal their bundles. We got some really stunning patterns and details in the prints, which amazed and fascinated everyone who took part – including my assistant Erica!
Above all, this simple project showed how easy it can be to engage all ages in sustainability issues through simple, creative activities. All ages took part in the workshop and all were equally fascinated to discover that you can create such wonderful colours using (mainly) what grows in your garden. A drop-in activity like this is an easy way to talk to people about the environmental issues around textiles and dyes and to encourage a closer appreciation and exploration of what is growing in our local parks, wastelands or gardens.
Find out more about commissioning a project or activity here. I love the challenge of creating events and activities tailored to specific venues, themes or projects.
I’m not long back from a glorious week teaching at Chateau Dumas. It is as wonderful as it looks. I’ve never had such a luxurious teaching experience!
The Art of Textiles course covered masses of creative techniques over the course of 6 days and we started with my experimental and freestyle approach to natural dyes. The students loved this! We made solar dye jars with onion skins, walnut leaves, red cabbage, alder cones and saffron and left them to cook for the week, adding some iron when they got exhausted (colour running out) to bring out darker shades.
We made simple dye pots of local plants including walnut (which grows everywhere in the area including in the chateau grounds), and a mysterious yellow plant, red grapes, tea, turmeric, red onion skins and much more. Rust dyeing was also popular, after we collected piles of rusty metal from the Sunday morning flea market. Lots of the students used their gorgeous vintage linens from the market too, as did I, but most of my samples are still winging their way back from France in a very heavy box. We also made dye bundles from flowers, fruit, dyestuffs (like saffron) and boiled them in plain water or dye. Later in the week we got a steamer working and then were able to make the stunning leaf prints shown above. We all spent the week with stained fingernails from poking around in walnut dye vats! But no one cared and everyone loved it, even those who said they weren’t interested in natural dye. I couldn’t ask for a better response!
My next dye workshop in the UK will be covering most of these techniques, at the Black Country Museum in October. We won’t, alas, be doing solar dyeing as I suspect there won’t be as much sun as in the South of France – although I will be grateful for the lack of mosquitos!
After a year or so of experimenting with natural dyes, I’ve had plenty of disappointments alongside a lot of happy accidents, although very few ‘turned out just how I planned’. I am not a precise, measuring, recording, repeating kind of dyer. I read a lot about dyes and then I experiment, break the rules, mess around…. I am the same with cooking; I love cookery books but I don’t follow recipes. In many ways I work similarly with textiles. I don’t design on paper, I work straight into fabric, from an idea in my head, allowing things to grow, adapt and develop.
Alice recently asked me what kind of dyeing I liked best; what was working for me. Without hesitation I replied that dye bundles are what I find the most exciting. Much as I love dyeing beautiful, simple colours with weld, walnut, avocado skins or tea, I have found that wrapping leaves, rusty metal, flowers or twigs up in fabric and leaving it to do magical things is by far my favourite way to colour cloth. It connects me to the plants in my garden, my local parks and the scrubby wasteland around my city-centre-edgelands home.
Fabrics dyed with locally-foraged weld
Hannah Lamb collects plants on walks to create cloth imbued with meaning and significance and I can’t think of a better way to mark the seasons and honour the land than to preserve tiny aspects of them in cloth. Hunting for dye plants has encouraged me to explore my local landscape in increasing depth. I have found weld growing in a local spot of city centre wasteland, due to be built on. I have discovered wild pear trees whilst looking for goldenrod in the park and found walnuts in a city centre church yard. Dye foraging is a perfect partner to my established habits of fruit-foraging and tree-spotting. The wildflower identification book I’ve had since 1980 has new page markers for dye plants. Dyeing has brought me closer still to my local landscape and for that I am thankful and joyful.
Bundle
I like abstract patterned fabric, I like mottled, discoloured and stained effects. I like actual stains too. Bundling fabric produces some – many – truly stunning watercolour-esque swirls, pools, stains, splatters and spots of colour. Often subtle, sometimes anything but. The greatest joy is the unknown. Unwrapping a bundle is a moment of delight.
A couple of weeks ago, whilst holidaying on the Kennet & Avon canal, I took a (literal) leaf out of Hannah’s book and collected leaves, petals and rusty metal along the towpath and in canal-side parks to create boat bundles which record some of places and plants of my holiday. I made simple, unscientific dye pots using walnuts, marigolds, elderberries, tea and buddleia to dye the foraged bundles and created some magical colours and patterns on scraps of silk. Bundling with stranded embroidery cotton leaves me with masses of space-dyed threads too. My next challenge is to stop being so precious and actually start using my dyed fabrics.
I recently completed a small community commission using natural bundle dyes to create a small display – more on this soon. If you want to join me in this wonderful plant dye journey I have a couple of workshops coming up:
Wild Dyes at Ruth Singer Studio, Sat 20th September. 10am-4pm. £45. Including steamed bundles and other dye techniques
Wild Dyes at Black Country Living Museum Sat 18th October
Dyeing fabric with petals (and some leaves) has to be one of the easiest and most satisfying way of putting natural colour onto cloth. It is ridiculously simple & effective, particularly on silk. I first tried it last year, after reading about it online, seeing what Hannah Lamb was doing with plant bundle (and in India Flint’s Eco Colour) and fully intended to do more over the winter, with petals I collected & froze in the autumn. But then my freezer packed up and the bags of petals soon turned to mush so I’ve had to wait until summer for some new petals to try.
My first attempt was with giant African marigolds. I happened to be walking through the park at just the point that the municipal gardeners were pulling up beds and beds of bright gold marigolds, so I filled a huge carrier bag with the heads. Most of them went into a dye bath, which produced a glorious orange-gold on the silk test sample (I have yet to use the rest of it).
The rest of the petals were wrapped in a piece of silk and put into a steamer for an hour, along with other bundles of cloth with leaves, petals and bits and pieces. The marigold was the most successful. There are a few pink petals (geraniums I think) in there for good measure and the dark spots seem to be from the ends of the petals – I just pulled the flower heads apart, rather than cutting off the dark root area.
I steamed the bundles for an hour & then left them for a few days. I didn’t bother leaving the new batch as I am not sure it makes much difference.
The hydrangea one didn’t do very much so I re-used the cloth in some more leaf-based dye experiments later in the year.This year’s first experiments have been with mainly rose petals, again collected in Abbey Park, collected under the rose bushes just as they fell. I also added some apothecary’s rose petals from my garden, a few eucalyptus leaves, also from the park and oddments of other leaves and petals.
This time I soaked each piece of cloth in some pale Hypericum dye from last year, then scattered the leaves and petals around. I also added some splashes of iron mordant to the fabrics which you can see as brown or darker purple spots. The dark red rose petal colour seeped out onto everything, staining pink / purple. The yellow petals created some very subtle colours along with the reds. I was most impressed with the hemp fabric which took the purple dye really well. Folds, crumples and creases in the fabric act as a resist, as did some cherry leaves which imparted no colour but protected the cloth from the petal dye. Splotchy, patterned and irregular dye is exactly what I want. It couldn’t be more perfect for me.
Process:
Wet fabric (pre-mordanted if required, I did not) with water, tea, dye etc
Sprinkle or arranged petals as desired. You can place them carefully in patterns and fold the fabric over so you get symmetrical prints. I did this with one piece of silk, but it wasn’t particularly effective.
Drip or splash some iron mordant over the wet fabrics before or after adding petals
Roll up. Tie with thread (I used stranded cotton which took very little dye but I have nice subtle colours)
Place in steamer (I used an electric steamer bought from the car boot sale for £2) and cook for an hour
Leave overnight. Unwrap and compost the petals. Leave fabrics to dry in the shade. Iron (with an old iron as there is some plant residue stuck on) before washing.
I’ll be teaching natural dye techniques at the following events:
I Love Market Harborough event, Sat 19th July (drop-in event where you can see some basic dyes in action)
Wild Dyes at Ruth Singer Studio, Sat 20th September. 10am-4pm. £45. Including steamed bundles and other dye techniques
Wild Dyes at Black Country Living Museum Sat 18th October (not yet on their website).
One of the holy grail natural dyes seems to be St John’s Wort, capable of producing reds, pinks, yellows and greens from the same flowers. Investigating this, I deduce that this ideal plant is Hypericum Perforatum, which is a small plant, quite distinct from the hypericum shrubs that appear to be beloved of municipal planting schemes, at least in Leicester. Before I worked this out, I picked 5 flowers of the ordinary kind from a park shrub and brewed them up in a tiny bit of water, following (ish) India Flint’s multiple extraction process to see if I could get different colours. The first was golden yellow but the second and third brews didn’t produce much. As it cooled, the dye started to turn pinky-orange and after an hour or so, was rich madder pink! Is this some kind of oxidisation? I’ve no idea.
I soaked a few pieces of unmordanted silk in the tiny dyebath and produced a lovely peachy pink, not dissimilar to avocado but with a more orangey tint. Gorgeous!
A couple of weeks ago I found another patch of the shrubs still in flower and picked a huge bag full.
I tried the same dye extraction method but this time it took many, many repeated boilings. I got a lot of very pale yellow dye which didn’t turn pink-red so I kept going. Eventually the orangey-pink colour started to come out so I strained off into a different dye bath and after 20 or so repeated extractions, the orange kept coming but I gave up, exhausted with it!
The colour changed dramatically again; yellow is the first series of extractions, then the lighter orange was where I stopped. After a couple of hours it changed to the darker colour. I’ve not dyed with this vat yet.
left; first extraction of dye, top; after it started turning orange, right; after cooling an hour or so
Yesterday I spent a wonderful day on Clarabella’s A Muted Palette natural dye workshop, experimenting with subtle colours, modified with iron, called saddening. I learned a huge amount and am now very keen to experiment more to create the kind of muted and mottled fabrics and threads that I love to use. I’ll add photos of them soon.
Just a brief outline of the new workshops to come in 2014, full details soon!
Workshops 2014
All workshops are 10am-4pm on Saturdays at Ruth Singer Studio, Leicester. £55 each or book 3 for £150
Miniature Art Quilts. 25th January
Shadow Embroidery. 23rd February
Cut-surface quilting. 22nd March
‘Squares’ hanging, 2013. More details here
Family Stories. 26th April
Handmade fabrics. 31st May
Smocking, Shirring & Gathering. 28th June Rescheduled for 21st June
Found objects and amulets . 19th July
Photos on Fabric. 30th August
Monumental Folly pincushion 25x15cm More
details here
Wild Dyes. 28th September Rescheduled for 20th September
Trapunto Quilting. 1st November
Transparency. 6th December. Rescheduled for 13th December
I’m delighted by this one. Buddleia or Butterfly bush, grows pretty much all over the place here. Living in a city, there’s lots of wasteland around, particularly on my walk into town, where this stuff loves to grow. All over the canal tow path, around the parks and in scraps of land. I personally love it, but there are plenty that hate it. It may not be native, but how can you not love something that is covered in purple flowers for months of the year and is covered in butterflies, even in the heart of the city.
Some small bushes at the side of the ring road had been hacked down, taking down the still-flowering and dead heads. I picked up a few handfuls – about 10 heads, mostly dead ones. They went in the slow cooker overnight and created the most amazing honey-scent, just like the flowers were still in full bloom. After 10-11 hours, the dye was golden yellow and I thought I might have overcooked it. After straining the dye, I put some unmordanted fabrics in – within 20 minutes the silk became a wonderful primrose yellow, so I took them straight out. Other fabrics were not so good – cottons (unsurprisingly) didn’t take too well, although the cotton lace did. Hemp silk looked stunning and golden after a day sitting in the warm dye. It had no effect on pale indigo on cotton though. Some of the fabrics dried with brown patches, which I almost like, but I will probably overdye them.
As the dye had plenty of life left in it, I put more fabrics in and left a bucketful to sit for 3 days. The colours were paler but still very pretty, although the silk organza came out after a couple of hours, as it had turned light olive, not the primrose yellow of the other silks, just to be confusing. I treated a snippet of it with vinegar to see what happened; it became slightly paler but not much.
I’ve now got some cotton mordanted so I can try again with the buddleia dye, either with what is left of the current vat, or some more another time. Next to come in dye series: Hypericum & Marigold which I have tried and are lovely, plus goldenrod of which I have made the dye but not even tried a test sample. I’ve done a few leaf / petal bundles too, but I have a lot to learn about them. One had come out brilliantly, one is ok & one is strange indeed! There are 3 more sitting in plastic bags to be opened in a few more weeks. I’ve also got walnut brewing and have got MASSES of random vegetation waiting for me to have time to play. I was lucky at the car boot sale and bought a huge stainless steel bucket, so I can dye larger things, or at least mordant larger amounts of fabric. I’ve had a big sort out to organize all my white fabric, so expect more! I’m also going up to Yorkshire in a few weeks to learn from Clarabella, the expert, in her Muted Palette workshop, something I’ve wanted to do for ages and things finally fell into place. I can’t wait!
Ruth Singer 