Colour to dye for!

Yesterday I went along to a natural dye workshope at Beetle Felt studio. I've had a go at natural dyeing on my own with books and whilst working with artisans in India and have been meaning to get back into it for a while. Like so many other things I've just not got round to it, so when I saw this workshop advertised I booked myself onto it. Having a go with people who've done lots of dyeing, and sharing tips and ideas is a great way to get you motivated, set your creativity off and get excited about a project.

The practice of applying colour to cloth using plants and vegetables goes back thousands of years. The earliest evidence is the excavations of madder dyed cloth at the Indus Valley civilisation site of Mohendjo Daro. In Britain madder was used to dye the coats of the British Redcoats. The colour comes from Alizarin which is found in the root of the madder plant.

Indigo is another ancient dye extracted from the Indigofera plant, native to countries of the tropics. India, China, Japan and South East Asia have all grown and used the plant for dyeing for many centuries.

In Europe Indigo is commonly associated with the dyeing of denim for jeans.

Treasures of Indian Textiles, a publication of the Calico museum, explains that many of the dyeing processes of madder and indigo and the use of the medical herb Harda, myrobalan, which is used in assisting the dyes, were discovered in alchemic laboratories, 'where the search for the elixir of life, the freeing of the body and mind from the onslaught of time were the main pursuit.' As well as discovering extracts and active principles for dyeing during this research, many valuable medicinal remedies were also discovered in plants. Plants discovered for having essential properties for dyeing also became the source of essential ingredients used in Ayervedic medicines.

Colour can be extracted from almost anything growing in your back garden, out in the countryside or lying around your kitchen. Onion skins, beetroot, tea leaves, berries, oak galls and much more.




The history of the cultivation and use of natural dyes is as fascinating as experimenting with the massive range of colours you can get. Discovering the array of colours you will achieve with the vast amount available and then when mixing with others and with mordants, you feel like your are constantly concocting a magical potion. The process can go on and on.


We dyed with four different dyes: madder, oak galls, blackcurrants and onion skins. The madder was in the form of a powder, which you can get in this form from many suppliers, There are loads of websites you can buy them off, some good ones are; dtcrafts, fibrecrafts and wild colours. The oak galls were picked off oak trees locally, the blackcurrants picked from the garden and the onions skins collected and kept after peeling for cooking. Each of these are simmered in hot water over a stove for about an hour, strained off and then the washed fabric or yarn is added. You can then leave the fabric in as long as it needs to get the colour you want. For this workshop we dyed without mordanting the fabrics beforehand as we didn't have the time in one morning to do so. The colour varies with and without the use of the mordant.



A mordant helps fix the dye and keep it colourfast. There are all sorts of mordants you can use, again many of which you can collect for free. Examples are iron which you can get from rusty nails, tin, wood ash and loads more. A common mordant, alum is available from chemists or websites such as the ones mentioned above.


We produced some beautiful colours with the dyes on their own. I had enjoyed it so much that I got home and did some more. This time I tried with dyeing with alum as a mordant.

My discoveries of colours through experimenting with different natural dyes brings me back to wondering about how the first people, these ancient alchemists must have felt on being the first to produce an amazing vibrant colour out of something so readily available.

I also wonder whether they were searching for particular colours or whether they came upon them by chance. This leads onto my current research into the block printed patterns of Gujarat and Rajasthan. In ancient times were the colours used just because they were available or were they used for particular reasons or to represent meanings?

In Treasures of Indian Textiles, it gives the ancient meanings within Hindu culture of colours: 'Red was the colour evoked between lovers'...of the three tones of red 'majitha, madder was the fastest to symbolise the love that could never be washed away'. ' Yellow was the colour of Vasant, spring, of young mango blossoms, swarms of bees....Nila, indigo, was the colour of Krishna who is likened to a rain filled cloud, another blue, Hari nila, the colour of water in which the sky is reflected. Gerua, saffron, was the colour of the earth and of the yogi the wandering minstrel, and the poet who renounces the earth'. These colours were worn to express the mood of a person, whether they were love sick, repentant or observing a vow.

...Whitworth wanderings continued 'Shindigo Space' and 'Walls are talking'

Not knowing this was on I was pleasantly surprised to walk into this beautiful display of indigo resist dyed hemp fabric and sculptures aptly named Shindigo Space. They are by a Japanese artist called Hiroyuki Shindo who is a master dyer and leading textile artist in Japan. He has successfully combined traditional shibori and other resist techniques to create contemporary pieces that compliments and are complimented by the architectural space they inhabit. It is a display you should go to see in person because of this. The whole experience of viewing the layers of long hanging indigo and white textured fabrics against the sculpted sumptuously textured thread spheres wouldn't be the same viewing the pieces in a book or singularly on their own.

There's something about a strong indigo and bright white that is pleasing to the eye yet something so simple and a dyeing tradition that has been practiced for thousands of years.

The Walls are talking exhibition gave new lights to wallpaper. I loved seeing the different and diverse interpretations of a medium that is mostly seen as an everyday nondescript surrounding by artists who were challenging concepts of wallpaper.
Two wallpapers that were particularly interesting to me because of their relevance to my research were ones by Zineb Sedira. She was born in France to Algerian immigrant parents and her cultural background plays an important part in her art.

(This picture is from the artist's website, the piece in the exhibition is a smaller version of this)

From afar the paper appeared to be patterned in a traditionally Islamic perfectly symmetrical geometric pattern, but on looking closely portraits of Sedira, her mother, grandmother and daughter were placed inside the dense, intricate patterns. Une generation de Femmes and Quatre generations de femmes (1997) challenged notions of the female / male divide and each's role in society. As the making of these intricate mathematical patterns is traditionally a male occupation in Islamic culture, Sedira was reminding us that women's role in this society is integral to familial society but often disguised or not realised.

Whitworth wanderings

Took a trip to the Whitworth gallery in Manchester today.
I could have spent a whole day there if time permitted, there was such a variety of exciting exhibitions. Some of the textiles on display had changed since I was there last. There was some beautiful Kutchi embroidery and Pakistani ralli quilts (above). And also the Bengali kantha embroidery which I love the stitches and quirky figurative motifs of -

I re-visited The Manchester Indian exhibition displaying a selection of Indian silk collected by Thomas Wardle in the 1800s.

I particularly liked this tunic from Peshawar that Wardle purchased in 1886. It is decorated with rogan work. A technique of painting with castor oil that creates a sort of relief wax effect. It could easily be mistaken for embroidery from afar. I visited one family still producing rogan work in Kutch a couple of years ago. They were one of only a few keeping the craft going.
Peshawar town was strategically located close to the Khyber pass, the main route to and from Afghanistan. A lot of the textiles for sale here would come from Bokhara in Central Asia.

This also explains a lot of the brightly coloured fabrics not typically Indian you see stitched into quilts and worn as scarves by communities such as the Jats in Kutch and other parts of Gujarat and I presume Pakistan too. These are clearly Russian in origin, have been sold in Central Asian bazaars and brought to India with nomads and along the trade routes.

Some good books to read about Central Asia's trade routes and history are The Road to Oxiana By Robert Byron, A short walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby and The heart of Central Asia, which I am currently reading, by Colin Thubron. There are also many books documenting the silk road.

Arts Chat success!

I am pleased to say my talk for the Chorlton Arts Festival went well and received a good turn out. It was a great opportunity to share my experiences with people interested in Indian textiles, are textile artists or researchers themselves or are generally interested in Indian culture.
Thanks to everyone who came!
Hopefuly there will be more to come..

Chorlton Arts Festival

I will be giving a talk during Chorlton Arts Festival on the patterns and textiles of the desterts of Gujarat and Rajasthan in India. It will explore the background of the region , the history of the crafts and craftspeople, the stories behind the patterns and uses of cloths and where these crafts people and their work are currently heading in changing times.http://chorltonartsfestival.com/events/ruth-clifford-patterns-of-identity-in-rural-india/

Potty about pots!

I went to this exhibition of kachchhi pottery last year during the ceramics biennial in Stoke on Trent. I was so impressed that they'd managed to ship 100s of pots all the way from India to England and only breaking one or two.


It brought back amny memories of seeing the amazing potters and their work when I was over in kachchh. The potters are one of the lowest and poorest castes of India yet they are highly skilled craftspeople. Nowadays their skills are at risk of being lost due to the increase in availability of plastic and the most popular and cheapest crockery material of all - steel.

Potters don't traditionally paint patterns on the pots like this for everyday pots, but had been commissioned to do so for this exhibition. A lot of the patterns show similarity to the region's embroidery and depicts objects of everyday surrounings.


With textiles and jewellery it has been possible for collectors, buyers and traders to bring them to the West and so they are more widely recognised and appreciated.

This isn't as easier with such a fragile material as ceramics.
I hope there will be more exhibitions like this or perhaps we will start to see more of these beautiful objects in shops or markets here like we do the textiles.

On chatting to one of the organisers, a ceramacist currently based at RCA, I found that she knew Carole, the leader of the tour I went on for my first trip to Kachchh and where I met these potters.

While back in india this time I bumped in Carole while watching a concert of traditonal local music. I noticed that one musician was using one of these pots for percussion.

Craft Rally, Sheffield

It was back to my home town of Sheffield yesterday to take part in the Crafts council organised 'Craft Rally'. It was part two, the first part having been held in London a month previously.

I was intrigued by what it would be all about, as I haven't known of or been to an event such as this before. It was un by the maker and curator Helen Carnac, along with Art Quest and Yorkshire Artspace in Sheffield, as a way of bringing together craft makers to discuss the situation craft is in today.

The three talkers were Adam Sutherland, director of Grizedale Arts in Cumbria, Rebecca Earley, a London based designer and researcher into eco-friendly methods of textile design and production and Neil Brownsword, a ceramicist, researcher and lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University.

I have followed the work of Rebecca Earley ever since researching for my BA dissertation Can Sustanable Design be Compatible with Fashion?, so for me her talk was the most inspirational. She came across as a very decicated, ambitious person who has achieved a lot through persevering in the competitive, struggling environment that the world of art and design is. Never having any money was particularly one of the struggles I relate to! So it made me feel inspired to carry on with my work after seeing what she'd achieved.

Moreover, she is doing some very important work at a time when climate change is a huge issue, and sustatinability is the key word currently in so many fields. In the early 90s it was discovered that textiles, after the chemical industry, take up the second largest proportion of the world's landfill sites. Later in the 90s, surveys found that designers have 80% input into how much impact the product they are designing will have on the environment. These results were what made Rebecca want to take part in finding out how the design and making of textiles can have less impact on the environment.

Her design work has focussed on making fashion out of old, found fabrics and garments and re-designing and re-making them. In her early work she cut up, stitched and manipulated old clothes, scanned these and heat pressed them onto new fabrics, creating an innovative, contemporary print. She was also one of the first to print on organic cotton and has collaborated with Kate Fletcher, another key figure in pioneering eco fashion design.

TED 'Textiles Environment Design' is one of the projects Rebecca is involved in along with other researchers, teachers and designers of Chelsea college of Art and Design where Rebecca teaches and reads. The main theme she wanted to emphasise in her talk was 'interconnectivity' which is what TED is trying to do - connecting people from all over in different fields to collaborate with ideas in working towards sustainability and environmentally friendly design.

From Neil Brownsword's talk I was drawn to how he is looking back to the booming ceramics industry that Stoke-on-Trent, his home town, once saw. As with so many other craft industries, the steel in Sheffield another example, they have almost completely dissapeared. Obviously now, the main thrust of the industry being in China, India and other Eastern countries. He mentioned the funny directions and turns the design and production of a product takes. An object might have been made in China during the T'ang Dynasty that the designers of Stoke would have taken inspration from. And when there was no industry left in Stoke, the Chinese could be seen taking English Wedgewood designs, for example and making them to sell cheaply.

I could relate an aspect of this to my own research. In India, the handicraft industry is the second largest after the agricultural. A lot more is still happening in this industry because of it being so much bigger than in Britain. However, because of industrialisation, it has seen many ups and downs. There are lots of organisations and people trying to save this industry, to sustain the traditional crafts as well as their artisans livelihoods.

One of my questions arising from the discussions we had following the talks was ' How can makers in the Uk collaborate with Indian artisans to keep a craft going?' This is already happening amongst some universities, organisation and individuals. However I wondered can we not increase the scale of this? There are very few institutions open to rural village artisans in India, the main ones being in cities and aimed at the wealthy elite. Kala Raksha, as I have mentioned in a previous post started the first design school for traditional artisans to learn contemporary design and has created a path for more to follow.

Also, in the UK in my experience, the learning of traditional crafts all over the world is not focussed on in education, neither are traditional methods. Digital technology, machinery and faster production is encouraged to be able to survive in the UK industry.

This rally was an interesting and relavant idea for networking, discusisng current situations and collaborating to overcome probelms and difficulties in craft. It was good to have a platform where, in person we could share ideas and listen to what others are doing to continue these positive ideas and work to keep hand craft going.