bundles | Ruth Singer

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.

Boat Bundles. Buddleia bundle in elderberry. Walnut with thread binding markings

Walnut, iron and tea. Mahonia berries and iron

Boat bundles. Top left walnut + iron scrap. Bright yellow/ green is African marigold

Bundle threads

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).

Bundles: silk with marigolds right. Cotton with hydrangea left

petals on silk

Jar of marigold dye with silk sample

marigold dye

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.

Steamed bundles

In the steamer

Bundles

Drying

Rose on silk

Eucalyptus on hemp/silk

Rose & iron on hemp

Rose & iron on silk gauze

Rose and iron on silk

Dyed fabrics

Silk

Hemp with rose & iron

Wool felt with eucalyptus and rose staining

Silk with rose and iron

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).

Ruth Singer

Ruth Singer textile artist

Tag Archives: bundles

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