Dyeing with Natural Products.

You will have seen my 'tea bag embroidery' post earlier, and now I want to show you the actual results from dyeing with the tea, and other natural products.

This first photo shows the results from different herbal teas used to dye sample materials. Some of them are natural materials and others synthetic and it was interesting to see which ones worked better.

I then moved on to dyeing various yarns so I could use them in my project. This image shows some of them.

  



















After using the tea I tried to think of other natural and everyday dyes. I thought about herbs and spices, and other plants which may give their colour to yarns. This shows a few of the dyes which I tried. As you can see these are, listed from the front, lily pollen, paprika, cumin, curry plant and curry powder. I was particularly impressed with the curry plant, however as expected the curry powder worked very well.

Paper Twine Chair

This is now the finished chair. I think it is rather effective as it is not altogether obvious that has been mended. Some people may not even notice, but it is that subtlety that I am after.

Paper Twine Chair

These next few images are the different stages of threading the twine through.

 












This first part took longer than I thought it would, but it was nothing compared to the next part when I would have to weave it through these threads.


















This was my progress after a 10 hours of threading.




These next few are from the next day after a couple more hours of work. They are at the same stage but from different angles.

It was taking me forever to thread the twine inbetween each string, so I came up with this straw-like contraption to speed up the process, unfortunately it didn't speed it up very much. 

Paper Twine Chair

I found a pair of chairs which were slightly broken, and originally I wanted to use this one to replace the seat. 

Though after photographing this chair I feel that it has it's own personality with its broken leg etc. and decided that this one would be left as it is. The second chair in the pair is exactly the same, but without a broken leg.

I started to use my twine to create the seat not realising how long it would actually take me, as the twine is quite delicate, and having to thread it through the rather small holes did create some stress.

As I have said the twine is rather delicate meaning I had to take my time so that it would not break.

Paper Twine

I started to notice how much junk mail was being posted through the door and what a waste of paper this was. I decided to use the junk mail as part of my recycle and reuse project, and started using the leaflets to make paper twine.

I wanted to then use this twine to mend or fix something which was broken. As my chair project was sucessful last year I started to look into mending a different type of chair, I found an appropriate chair, which once had a rattan cane seat allowing the chair to be functional, and wanted to recreate the seat. However, I don't think the paper twine will be strong enough to make this chair functional again, it will be simply used to make the point about waste and how much we throw away.