Aki Kurihara will talk at the Natural Dye Symposium on 3rd July at 6pm. She’s a Japanese natural dyer and will introduce Earth Network, a Non Profit Organization working for sustainability and ecological safety on natural dye and pigment in her country. She spoke with the elephant from Beautiful Silks

What objectives have you set for 2012 and beyond? Shift a base to Australia and build new network on natural dyes and pigments. 


How did your fashion (or textile or art) career start? My first job was a textile buyer at a company in Japan although natural dye was introduced privately around the same time. Since then I have learned different techniques from great artists but I never considered natural dye as my professional career.


What is your rela­tion­ship with second- hand shops, for some it is just junk stor­age, for oth­ers it is an oppor­tun­ity to express their style and per­son­al­ity, what do you think? Second-hand shops have been always my best shops in all the places I have lived. Now I even feel uncomfortable to snip off price tags from brand new products. My children always wear clothes which have stories.

What setbacks have you faced as you made efforts to source materials It has been always difficult to find raw fibred and undyed materials. I prefer working with locally supplied materials rather than imported.


Imagine you had a full, unplanned day in Melbourne to do as you liked … where would you go? Eat? Shop? Sightsee? It’ll be my first visit to Melbourne. I’ll definitely go to the botanic garden to see the labelled native trees, as I am eager to learn about them.

Have your designs been effected by your choices in material? Choice of materials and plants always comes first than the designs.


What kind of woman wears one of your creations? Women who are naturally tanned.


If someone hadn’t heard of your business, how would you describe it? Mine is not quite a line of business. I have recently came back to textile and dye career. I used to give workshops on natural dye and felt making, also produce felt garments and accessories. I would like to start new project based on natural dye plants and local fibres which possibly involve local communities or other specialists.


What major projects are currently in the pipeline? A collaboration with a weaver in NZ who has been inspiring me a lot. A simple but fine peace of shawl using Japanese indigo dyed New Zealand wool.


Who would be your dream collaboration? I have a couple of talented friends I would like to work with one day. One is a boutique shoemaker in France and another is a fashion designer in Dunedin. 


Where do you see yourself in 5 years time? Somewhere in the forest or on the coast, not in big city.

I am so looking forward to returning to Melbourne for this workshop and to witness the amazing Natural Dye Symposium put together by the talented staff of Beautiful Silks.

In this workshop we will make a ‘nuno’ scarf either on a silk lap or silk fabric. You can choose from a variety of ways of making the scarf either in cut out pieces of pre-felt or lay wool in a pattern of your choice. I will bring some samples of my work for inspiration and you may choose to do something similar or have an idea before the workshop of something you have always wanted to try. We will dye on the second day using leaf matter found around Fitzroy or anything you bring from home with the help of iron or copper bars you may bring from home. I know there are iron railway pegs available at Beautiful Silks from my last visit, thanks to Naomi we raided a pile of scrap metal from a railway yard my friend returned home to WA will a ton of metal. You will need to bring strong thread to wrap up your scarf to dye, either linen or some other strong fibre from a natural source. Any special metal pieces you would like to wrap in your work to make special marks ie, nails, old rusty bottle caps, old coins.

Currently I am working towards an exhibition for the Mundaring Arts Centre with Feltwest Inc. I am dyeing silk naturally and then felting it to make wearable garments, dresses, wraps and tops.

I look forward to meeting the specail people who have booked to do this workshop and anyone else who may wish to join to try the ancient art of felt making.
LINDY FRAYNE

My weekly shop  is rarely boring -especially starting in the fruit and veg area – all the colour and variety are potential colourants for my experimentation. The most recent addition, ’red carrots’ – well do I get them to eat or  test for colour – well both – got a pack and cooked for dinner, the colour left from steaming was amazing – off to my work room – tear some silk and push into this hot liquid and forget – well – what an amazing result with no mordants. Rich pink -after washing.
Just recently in the supermarket – in the veg dept - I met an old friend who proceeded to say she had calyxes from the Rosella fruit (after making jam) would I like to try these for colour as they had a very rich burgundy  when cooking.
Got these last week  – and goodness me what a gourmet of colour – looks like red wine  and silk and cotton take the colours beautifully – rich pinks, purples and blues. Makes onion skins look quite contrasty to this richness.
 
Going camping or travelling around the country –  my large Milo tin has priority  along with a bag of fabric scraps – wee canvases  to test where we stop – bit of alfoil to cover the tin and viola – I have cloth with a memory, a story to use for my next inspirational art work.
I don’t  record  results as is often done – just obtaining a colour is enough of a record for my way of dyeing.
 
I love to pick up rusted bottle tops too – these with a bit of salty water ( good when near the sea) wrapped in fabric and put into a plastic bag  and left on the dash of the car as you travel -  the trick is to ‘try’ and forget it  and not open too soon – gives instant results and a cleaner environment to boot!
 
Bits of rusty wire and scrap metal are ‘bower bird’ items for my fabric marking – often off old cars or just found when taking a driving break – total gems, worth keeping in a nook in the car.
 
So all these snippets of colour and texture depending on the fabric used are fuel for my passion – after ironing vlisofix on to a base cloth, I tear the dyed bits and arrange them into a collage – then heavily hand stitch these -quite randomly, to hold all the layers together.
 
I tend to do the rust and tannic/ Iron buff dyeing at home – as this requires keeping the baths for further use later. The process is so easy and quick – it oxidises once immersed into two solutions (rust and caustic)- first a murky green - changing to mustard yellows/ browns – then add some tannic acid and the results totally possess your imagination with endless possibilities.
 
There are quirky things you can do to change the process too – hand painting  caustic on to the fabric then reversing the process and dipping into the rust gives strong markings without dyeing the whole piece of fabric – I show this technique in my workshops – and will be doing this at the Natural Dye Symposium in  Melbourne in July 2012.
 
Philomena Hali

I’m dedicating this post to Aminul Islam, murdered at the age of 40 in Bangladesh on April 6, a nameless teenage slave in South India and to a fish that isn’t there.

What do they have in common? They’re the unacceptable face of the world fashion industry in 2012.

Islam was a prominent Bangladeshi trade unionist in the garment sector, who disappeared in the country’s main textile hub just outside the capital where he led a top union that organised protests to increase wages. Shortly after his funeral, his brother told media, “It’s quite clear that he died of severe torture. Ordinary people cannot beat a man this way; it must be law enforcers,” Islam had previously been detained by police to stop him attending union rallies.
Bangladesh is the world’s second-largest apparel exporter with overseas sales of more than $19 billion in 2011. Press report here: http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=229751%3E
Across the border in India, two Dutch research organisations published a report on April 25 showing that working conditions were as bad as ever.

The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations and India Committee of the Netherlands found that European and US garment brands and retailers have failed in their attempts to structurally improve labour conditions at their suppliers in Tamil Nadu. Despite corporate promises and a range of well-meaning initiatives, workers, mostly very young women, continue to suffer exploitative working conditions – many under recruitment and employment schemes that amount to bonded labour. Press release here: http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=3a4764d9ac4a3e122869556b6 &id=db426688bd

In China, even the government run press is critical not necessarily of the low-wage side of mass fashion production but definitely of its environmental cost. The fashion industry is no longer as glamorous as it may appear, says China Daily, and by wearing a pair of jeans you may have contributed to the pollution of China’s rivers.
“For ordinary consumers, it’s hard to know how many polluting companies there are behind each of the popular fashion brands,” said Li Li, the founder and director of EnviroFriends, a Beijing-based environmental organization.
Li made the comment in a recent report called Clean up the Fashion Industry, published by five Chinese grassroots environmental organizations, which alleged that 46 Chinese and international clothing brands are being supplied by textile companies that violate the country’s environmental laws. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2012-04/18/content_15074002.htm?bsh_bid=90161258

I have to admit that find some of the views of Vivienne Westwood, the Brit anti-fashion high priestess, attractive. She says, True art gives culture; we are dangerously short of culture – culture is the antidote to propaganda…. The only sane view is the view that questions, “Can we make the world a better place?”

As opposed to much of the fashion which, I guess, makes the world a worse place.

Marion and I were privileged to work with a group of South Indian tribal women, setting up frameworks for their co-operative to teach them work skills and to raise funds so that they could create sustainable employment for themselves by turning waste – scrap silk in their case – to wealth. We are told that over 200 well paid (by local standards) jobs were created. Marion and I ensured that conservation and waste-control measures were in place – the locals even have a popular “propaganda” song about the dangers of pollution, and the lyrics talk about people giving up drinking coconut juice for bottles of Coca-Cola. (the top left photo shows a training session in a training centre partly funded by Beautiful Silks – top centre and right the kitchen of the original building where the cook was preparing two meals a day for 80 people a time)

We’ll carry on that work at the Natural Dye Symposium – where we will promote sustainable fashion which doesn’t waste resources, pollute ground or water, and which is sufficiently durable to ensure that it can be sold at a fair price to reflect the value of the producer’s labour.

A final thought as we contemplate the start of the carbon tax in a few weeks: why do all the empty buildings in Melbourne CBD have their lights switched on all night?

The Natural Dye Symposium is more than just work experience.

The Natural Dye Symposium is the very first Australian eco-fashion think-and-do-tank and this is your opportunity to be involved!

Over the next 10 weeks, you’re invited to undertake a self-propelled unit of your course – about fashion, product, and the environment.  As the volunteer team for the Natural Dye Symposium you’ll carry out practice-based research for textiles whilst playing a practical role in driving this innovative new forum.
 
You will work with many fashion and textile designers who are becoming keen to employ more sustainable strategies in their work.  You will meet practitioners whose garments are made from materials that also assist in the management of textile waste.  We’ll talk about water consumption and carbon impacts of the production phase as well as alternatives to disposal which until recently was seen as an inevitable by-product of fashion.
 
The Natural Dye Symposium will include a panel discussion which will explore schemes that encourage the consumer to engage in slow fashion consumption. The discussion will also talk about consumer behaviour, relationships and ways of thinking. We will investigate inventive and appropriate selection of materials, and examine the assimilation of processes from other industries to revise the way in which products are made.

Users of natural dyes and natural textiles recognize that mass consumption and production is part of the problem. Sustainability has been turned into a commodity by big brands to the point that it has become meaningless.  We’ll discuss the differing approaches to the design and manufacture of sustainable fashion garments that can also provide the opportunity for waste control and minimization.
 
In England, there’s an MA in Fashion & the Environment (Make ‘MA in Fashion & the Environment’ a hyperlink) based on the idea that production, use and eventual disposal of most clothing is environmentally damaging. In the next 10 weeks you’ll learn most of what they cover in two years.  

By becoming a part of the Natural Dye Symposium you will not only learn: you will be actively engaged in producing a forum that creates ambitious concepts which can revolutionise products and their sustainability; and in so doing redefine the role of the designer.

Interested? Elephant 03-90163745, business@beautifulsilks.com

I thought you’d enjoy this, Tracey and I found it in the shop yesterday – left by an anonymous client, so beautiful!

In the last decade heaps of progress has been made in work with natural dyes. Come and see some of the work on display at the India Flint Exhibition, a foretaste of the forthcoming Natural Dye Symposium in Fitzroy from 27 June 2012.

The exhibition is on NOW until 25 March.

At the Symposium, we’ll talk about and do workshops in sustainable development of the production and uses of natural colorants; responsible management of wild natural resources; ethical research methods respecting the rights of indigenous people regarding natural resource; and environmentally friendly production methods.

 

Today, the market is inundated with ‘throw- away clothes’, produced by low-paid workers with few rights in third world countries.  There have been times when European dyers used such toxic products as arsenic to render plant dyes fast.  Even today, 90% of all sulphur dyes are reduced using sodium sulfide. Home-dyers find that procion dyes and screen printing chemicals come with impacts on human health – those dyebaths and cleanup chemicals you pour down the drain at the end of the day had to actually go somewhere.

 

Discharge of sulfides in Australia is legally only permissible in very small amounts because of the dangers to aquatic life from liberated hydrogen sulfide, – notably the DNA of tadpoles – as well as corrosion of sewerage systems and damage to treatment works.

 

Well, people have made beautiful clothing for eons before we had those chemicals.  Historically cloth and garments were valuable objects which were kept the whole lifelong and were even handed down in wills. Dyes which stand out for their beauty and ecological attributes would never be employed on just any material but on noble fabrics such as wool, silk, linen or cotton, made to last more than one season.

 

The initiative to create clothes that are considered worth keeping will contribute to a change in the dynamics of responsible consumption.  The eventual depletion of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, which are used in the production of synthetic dyes, means that a return to the use of dye plants is a matter of foresight.

 

Looking towards the future, natural dyers can exploit material from forestry and agricultural waste, which at present is thrown away or burnt. Natural dyes are made from beetroot, turmeric, pomegranate, henna, indigo, madder root, certain flowers and leaves. The traditional cultivation of dye plants such as madder, weld and woad was common in Europe until the beginning of the 20th century. In other parts of the world cultivation of the indigo plant has never ceased.

 

We can have beautiful clothing without damaging the land.   What’s on display at 101 Victoria St, Fitzroy is just a taste.

 

One of our Natural Dye Symposium presenters, Ilka White is giving a floor talk in the gallery at 2.30pm on Saturday March 17th so come on down, it would be lovely to see you.

Details of the show:

Material Culture; Light and Volume
Counihan Gallery in Brunswick
233 Sydney Road (inside the Brunswick Town Hall)
Hours: Wed to Sat 11am – 5pm, Sun 1 – 5pm
Exhibition runs until March 25th

On the 5th of May 2012, Penny O’Neill will be running a crochet workshop for absolute beginners. The workshop will run from 1pm – 4pm.Get into a magical meditative and fun medium – and make things! Fun and laughter will abound as Penny gets into form! The workshop is $30.00 per person.Expressions of interest are welcome.Please send us an email at info@beautifulsilks.com or give us a call on 03 94197745.
Already have crochet experience? Consider coming to a Thursday night knitting sesh, run by the lovely Marlene every Thursday from 5pm – 7pm