Notable Hands - Craft - Dyeing Fabrics

Rodarte Fall 2008

Let's talk about dyeing fabrics at home.

This is also one of the essential tools in textile design, and one that designer usually opt for when they’re looking for specific shades in their own collections - ones that are not available from fabrics manufacturers.

Rodarte, the brand created by sisters Laura and Kate Mulleavy, works with a specialized fabric-dyer to get a unique shade for their collections. For instance, once they spent months looking of the perfect red-cock shade. This means that they use a lot of time, and resources for the coloring of their collections. That’s how important color is.

You can practice fabric dyeing at home too - either with natural, or synthetic colorants. Say you want a shirt to look ivory instead of crisp white; you can just dip it into a black tea pot for a few minutes/seconds until you see the perfect shade. Remember, after the fabric dries out, the fabrics looks lighter.

But when you are using strong colorants, it is always useful to try the exact shade you want with a small piece of the same fabric you’re using beforehand, and after you got it, you can actually dye the real fabric.

Some fibers are easier to dye. With synthetic materials, you might not even be able to change their shade, but wool, silk, cotton and linen are the best and friendlier materials to dye at home.

Dosa

Artisan dyeing fabric with indigo

DIY dyeing at home

Try it out, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is.

Image via Style.com, Streets and Yo's, Dosa, Google

Textile Design & Silk Screening

Humans have been dying fabric ever since times started. It is no secret that there are countless of techniques, industrial and DIY involved in the process of putting color and prints into woven surfaces. Some of the most artisanal techniques are Batik, which is based on wax to create patters, the most well known tie-dye, woodblock printing, which is an Indian specialized technique, and one of the most common, yet sophisticated techniques – silk screening.

This technique can be practiced at home, at the same time that the most high-end labels also use it to print unique motives into their fabrics. A silk Hermès scarf can be silk screened with more than 40 different patterns – one for each color – at the same time that someone at home can make a cool t-shirt or a canvas tote out of one and only screen. The possibilities are endless, and the process is pretty much 100% manual.

In order to work with silk screens, the specialized textiles designer or artisan uses a woven mesh that acts as a blocking stencil. The fabric has to be placed on a flat surface. After the screen in located in the right place on top of the fabric, ink is poured horizontally on the screen, and a blade is then slid across the length of the screen, and back. This enables the ink to flow uniformly within the mesh pattern on the screen, and no residues are left behind. Only the open mesh areas can transfer ink into the materials, and it’s possible to see the result instantaneously.

Also, any kind of flat surface can be printed, starting with natural fiber fabrics to canvases, and even knits.

Erica Tanov's totes being silk-screened

Take a look from the Hermès demonstrations in San Francisco, and Erica Tanov’s unique tote designs and production.

Final Tote

Hermès printing demonstration

Erica Tanov's images via http://ericatanov.blogspot.com/