On March 25th, Kristine Vejar from A Verb For Keeping Warm (AVFKW) came to our Kyoto store and held a plant dyeing workshop. The students, as well as our staff, were looking forward to this day.
In the first half, he taught me step-by-step the basic techniques of dyeing with plants from the book "The Modern Natural Dyer" published last year. Kristine is a very charming person, she answered many questions politely, and the WS proceeded in a friendly atmosphere from beginning to end.
After that, I started working on the actual dyeing.
Powdered dyes brought from the United States such as madder, marigold, and logwood, as well as natural dyes such as flower petals, and threads are put in a pot and boiled. Threads with subtle gradations are born from the same pot by adding threads at different times. All the finished threads are gentle colors and really nice.
Kristine told me to knit something with these 12 colors, and we were talking about whether we should make a cowl or a hat. I think it would be cute to knit a sweater with colorful threads in stripes.
Ms. Kristine said that she was able to write a book about vegetable dyeing that she had learned in the United States for the past 10 years, and that she would like to study dyeing abroad from now on. On this day as well, I was able to hear interesting stories about dyeing in Indonesia, which I traveled to before coming to Kyoto, and Japanese indigo dyeing.
She will come to amirisu's autumn retreat again! I can't wait to see what kind of ws it will be next. If you missed it this time, please join us there.