Gail Harker Center for Creative Arts - Immersion Dyeing with Natural Dye Extract

Natural dye extracts bring the deepest, most brilliant colors from history into the palette of today?s fiber artist. In this class we will discuss the origins of the dyes we will be using, and demonstrate how to prepare the cloth to receive them. We will immersion-dye fiber in several colors using cochineal, madder, and weld among others and learn the idiosyncrasies of each dye. We will experiment with clamp-and-fold techniques and simple stitch resists to introduce patterns to our cloth. Every student will receive a full set of samples and pieces of dyed cloth. This class will give students the knowledge and confidence they need to proceed on their own into the world of natural dyes.