#sasha duerr

[bumblebeeappletree]

Sasha Duerr uses just about anything to dye clothing: from kitchen waste (coffee grounds, avocado pits, and onion skins) to invasive "weeds" (wild fennel, oxalis) to the leaves, fruit, or petals of nearly any tree or plant (maple, pear, cherry, fig, acorn, fern, dahlia, poppy, lavender, etc).

Inspired by permaculture, Duerr believes in a slower approach to textile dying- she founded the "Permacouture" Institute to help advance Slow Textiles- both as a way to respect the environment, but also because she believes that plant-based color is more beautiful and truly alive.

"Natural dyes harmonize with each other in a way that only botanical colors can,” she writes in her book The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes(*). “A natural dye, a red for example, will include hints of blue and yellow, whereas a chemically produced red dye contains only a single red pigment, making the color less complex... The unique qualities of naturally dyed textiles can often make the color vibrate or glow, which is truly magical."

The colors produced by plants may be magical, but the process to create them- believes Duerr- is really quite simple. To prove just how accessible the organic botanical color really is, she helped create the Fiber and Dye Walk at the California College of Arts and Crafts (where she teaches). In a simple walk through the campus, there are over 30 plants and trees that can be used as dyes, including, apple, aloe, bamboo, cherry, eucalyptus, fig, ivy, olive, juniper, lily, rosemary, and wisteria.

This isn’t new information, as Duerr points out, during World War Two our grandparents were using things like red cabbage as a dye, but quickly the knowledge is becoming lost. When Duerr began to educate herself in organic botanical color sources, she turned to farmers and indigenous communities in an attempt to catalog what was once more common knowledge.

Duerr doesn’t want to teach the world to create color from our surroundings- in a sense Slow Color- simply so we’ll all become better stewards of nature and our shared culture, it’s also for us as human beings. “Much of what has become problematic in our modern lives,” she believes, “is related to our having forgotten how to connect with simple rhythms of nature”.

In this video, Duerr takes us for a tour of all the dye plants in the garden of a home she happens to be housesitting; she brews up a few batches of natural color from the leaves of a fern and fig and loquat trees; she gives us a tour of her natural-dyed wardrobe (including pieces from her bioregional knitwear collection Adie + George, created and run with partner Casey Larkin); and finally, she dyes a secondhand silk shirt for that evening’s event using the loquat leaves from the tree outside the house.

* Her book’s complete title is The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes: Personalize Your Craft with Organic Colors from Acorns, Blackberries, Coffee, and Other Everyday Ingredients.

Original story here: http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/...

Adie+George: http://adieandgeorge.tumblr.com/

Sasha's book: http://www.timberpress.com/books/hand...

Originally posted on YouTube on February 13th 2012

[permacouturepress-blog-blog]

Tickets are now available for our SUMMER Seasonal Color+Taste Palette Series at Gospel Flat Farm in Bolinas, California. Explore the biodiversity of the plant based color+taste palette in our day-long workshop: including a natural dye workshop with seasonal hues, an in-depth tasting of the ripest summer produce, a weed walk of inspiring fiber and dye producing plants, and installation of your plant colored textiles, all while enjoying a beautiful multi-course farmstead lunch made with the same colorful ingredients. Sunday, July 21st, 2013, 10am-3pm.

To reserve your place and for more information please visit HERE!

[sashaduerr-blog]

Join Permacouture and Your Local Hive  for a “Dinner to Dye For” in Los Angeles this Sunday, November 11th,  at Peter Fetterman Gallery in Bergamot Station. Seasonal color and cuisine all from the same ingredients of autumn in Southern California.

[sashaduerr-blog]

CCA Young Textile Artists

Coloring the CCA Young Textile Artist's felted designs with plant dyes made from avocado pits (via SF design district mexican restaurants), foraged plum leaves and lemons.

[drewkellyphoto]

I recently photographed a story on the nearly forgotten practice of making of natural dyes for The New York Times. I spent the day with writer Michael Tortorello and our expert Sasha Duerr, an instructor in the textile department at CCA, as she showed us plants that could be used to make natural dyes and even brewed up a few batches for us. Natural dyes have fallen out of common practice with the advent of synthetic dyes and their ability to be reproduced exactly. But with these synthetic dyes come a host of harmful chemicals. Aside from the environmental benefits of using natural dyes, the colors that are produced are just incredible, with so much more subtlety and range. And it was just fascinating to see the unexpected colors emerge from weeds and leaves we collected all around us. This is becoming a longer post than intended, so if you are interested in natural dyes, you should read the article or pick up a copy of Sasha's book, The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes.

[thegreenshows]

Sasha Duerr will be at the Ecolux 2011 Designer pop-up shop at Bloomingdale's SOHO on Thursday, April 21 from 6-7 for a book signing! Check out a book review by following the link...

(via e c c o * e c o: Review of Sasha Duerr's Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes)