Botanical Bundle Dyeing Fibre Workshop the Georgeson Botanical Gardens

Bundle dyeing is an artful technique that involves wrapping fabric with plant materials, like petals and leaves, and allowing their natural pigments to infuse the fabric, creating colorful patterns and designs. In this process, the fabric is tightly bundled with various plant materials, such as flowers, leaves, extracts, lake pigments or other plant parts, and then steamed or boiled to transfer the natural pigments onto the fabric. Vivid colors and intricate patterns are created, making each piece a unique work of art.

In this playful, process based workshop, participants will create their own unique pieces exploring botanical alchemy through the bundle dye method.

Each participant gets their own large habaotoi silk piece to dye and create! Silk is sourced from Canadian Natural Dye and Fibre arts collective, Maiwa.

There will be an education session prior to beginning (and continuous information throughout the workshop!) This will include going over local natural dye plants both wild and cultivated and a walk through the dye garden. There will be a focus on color theory using botanical pigment.

About your instructor: Blaine Lunsford of The Woven Boreal

Blaine has worked with natural dyes for over 8 years as well as dyers from around the world. She weaves storytelling, the science of play, and indigenous epistemology into her workshops, inviting an atmosphere centered around ecology, relationship to the land, plant connection and artistic expression. Blaine has taught workshops in the summers in Fairbanks over the years, visiting from Canada. She officially moved to Alaska last year and works in community arts. As a facilitator, she is passionate about creating accessible containers for folks to learn about natural dyeing to utilize learned skills and techniques at home.

Find her on instagram at @thewovenboreal

How the workshop will run:

1) Choose your flowers, herbs, plants and extracts. There is a variety of ways to go about selecting your plant hues which we will cover prior to beginning. This step is playful, connective and can be intuitive or methodical. We will walk through the Penny Wakefield Natural Dye Garden in the Georgeson Botanical Gardens and get to choose stunning, fresh, homegrown dye flowers and plants!

2) Arranging the Design: Explore your creativity as you arrange the botanical elements on the fabric.

3) Bundle Creation: Bundle the fabric and botanical treasures, wrapping them with care.

4) Heat and Infusion: Delight in the alchemy of steam as we immerse the bundles into a steam basket or pot, allowing the botanical pigments to extract, dye and fuse their vibrant hues to the fabric. Aromatherapy fills the space during this step, intoxicating the space with floral and herbal scents.

5) Unveiling the Masterpiece: We will unwrap the bundles, revealing the exquisite designs that nature and we have created together!

Blaine opens up the space to discuss creativity and describes key natural dye techniques so participants leave with at home application tools to continue creating new or up-cycled textiles. Resources will be provided for participants to utilize, but feel free to bring a notebook to jot down some notes! This class is meant provide sustainable and foundational education to be utilized in any way. Participants in the past have gone on to create their own natural dye collectives, hobby based businesses, integrated natural dyeing into their textile or fiber art practice and more!

All textiles are provided and prepped beforehand with a process called scouring and mordanting to ensure lasting binding and fusing dyes on the fiber. Care instructions will be provided.

This workshop typically runs about 2-2.5 hours, however plan for some extra time just in case some steps take longer depending on the groups needs.

Note: If you are signing up for this workshop and the Indigo Dyeing with the Organic VAT Method workshop, feel free to bring your silk bundle-dyed bandana to dip in the indigo vat, creating more layered hues/pigment combinations!

Minimum Number of participants: 7

Maximum Number of participants: 12

Location: The Georgeson Botanical Gardens in Fairbanks, Alaska

Contact: Blaine Lunsford, [email protected]

This class is pre-registration only due to the material based nature of the workshop.

Host or Publisher Prairie Honey Creative + Georgeson Botanical Gardens