How to Bundle Dye for Eco Printing ​⁠@WildcraftDyeing

[Music] welcome to bundle dyeing for eco printing my name is zoe mcdonald and this is history science fiber [Music] so the first question is picking out fabrics and in general you want to use plant fibers i generally start with cottons cottons are great for making the bees wax food wraps sewing projects and as wrapping paper the second fabric that works really well is linen for tablecloths napkins or summer dresses now you want to cut the fabric into two meter or two yard length to work with it so scouring is the act of washing your fabric or your fiber ahead of time to ensure any chemicals any sizing any starch anything like that is taken out which is going to inhibit your dye potential so you want to add a mild soap like center pole and it's going to be 2 teaspoon 2 teaspoons for every 1 pound or 450 grams of fabric and here's where just cutting that into those 2 meter or 2 yard length make it so much easier to use to work with under the water so you want to use a bin that's going to be the right size so if you've got multiple lengths at the same time just make sure the bin is large enough that your fabric can move around in the water so you want to use a hot water and dissolve the soap and have it there for about an hour and then once you're done you're going to give it a rinse and tip the bin out and you're ready for step two the second step is mordanting which is what's going to allow your pigment to actually adhere to your fabric and that's similar to scouring and that you're going to add it into the bin into the water and you are going to heat that up and then you're going to add your fiber and so what you're going to use there's a wide range some people do soy milk aluminum acetate is great for plants now another one people use is alum or aluminum sulfate uh that's mostly used on animal fibers but you can use it on plant fiber now when it comes to morning ting you want to use about five to ten percent woof woof stands for weight of fiber so if you have a hundred grams of fiber you want five to ten grams uh in general you can also use teaspoons so for every 100 grams of fabric you can use two teaspoons of morton then just like the scouring you're going to agitate it for an hour then hang to dry on the day you're going to be bundle dyeing you want to keep the fabric a little bit damp that helps the dyes adhere it comes to the dye materials you have lots of options out there you can grow your own in a garden or in pots for example marigolds will give you beautiful ranges of yellows and greens coreopsis is another great flower that's easy to grow you'll find it in lots of garden shops weld will give you a lovely lemon yellow um you can also do invasives such as dandelions even tansy which is a big invasive where i am is one that you can start so you can harvest a lot of these flowers you can also go for roots this is the matter plant which has been used since pre-viking age to get those rich red colors so you can do roots you can do flowers hollyhocks is another popular garden plant that gives you really good colors to use also mushrooms mushrooms are becoming more and more popular you can forage for those they come in a wide range of colors you can use the gills in a lot of the species and depending where you are there's lots of other stuff to forage for like red older cones and other parts of the plants we have oregon grape here you can use the roots the flowers or the berries you could also use leaves like birch leaves give you beautiful yellows and greens even stuff from your grocery store like onion skins can give you some rich golden colors check out my channel for a wide range of dyes you can use now another option is store-bought natural dyes which can be great come in a wide range of colors they're more reliable in terms of what you can access so those are great for bundle dyeing too so lastly what kind of equipment that you're going to need here i'm going to show you some of the outdoor equipment that we used when we do bundle dyeing we have large pots you want to have a tarp on the ground that you can lay the fabric onto that's really helpful and you're going to want to heat source and i'm going to show you the heat source in a second but first we're going to talk about techniques so step one is to cut your fabric into whatever project size you want second you can do the center fold which is simply placing the material on one side of the long edge here you can see the design and you're going to fold that fabric onto itself you can also do a diagonal fold where again we're laying out material in a certain pattern once you have that half filled up you're going to fold that back onto itself and carefully roll it up into a bundle and secure it with string another style i'm going to show you in a little bit is the full size when you do dies from one end to the very end and that's a really really useful way to do patterns once it's rolled up and secured with string you're going to put it into a heat source in order to set the dies you need to steam them almost like vegetables for a solid hour you want them in your heat source on a raised platform above water and boil the water underneath for one hour as you can see here we've started to boil and each of these packages has been rolled up tightly and tied with string and as you heat them for that hour you will start seeing the dyes soak through each of the bundle the bundles will go from that light natural color to much darker as those dyes start to bleed out and then once you're done you're going to leave them for 24 hours that's important to allow the dies to set and then they're ready to unfold and see what you have and when it comes to unrolling um i've just used a pair of scissors to cut off the string and then as i learned throughout this process you want to un unroll it over a bowl and then what comes out can just simply go right into the composter once you've basically got a lot of the materials away you can start giving your um your fabric a bit of a rinse try getting those larger pieces off of it so it is time to start drying it and ironing it and setting those colors now earlier i mentioned what you want to do for a design that's going to be across your entire fabric whether that's going to be words or a pattern whether it's random and what you want to do is you want to add a layer to inhibit the dye from bleeding and mirroring itself across the rolled fabric and for that you're going to need some kind of plastic or a barrier i just used cling wrap so i laid out my fabric i did my design i laid down the plastic and then i rolled it up all together into a bundle and that worked really well to allow that design to not bleed across and to stay crisp now once it's done unfolding and you've given it a little bit of a rinse and what i did next is i just laid it out very quickly in the sun obviously not too long in the sun because then it would start to fade just enough to kind of giving it uh mostly dry and then i used an iron just to help set those colors all in all bundle dyeing is an amazing way to create some really fun fabrics it's really really fun to do with kids as well i highly recommend it and so i just wanted to share some videos of some of the patterns of how they came out that set an example of the rectangular fold where it's mirrored down the middle here's another rectangular fold where we looked at doing zigzags here's as you recall was the diagonal fold and i wanted to show you kind of one of the mistakes that we did for this pattern specifically when you opened it up we realized we didn't go all the way into the folds there was that blank space so when you are going to do to the fold try to make sure it's all the way across right up to that fold here's another example of a diagonal fold that was done with logwood you could also use some tie dye techniques here where i tied it off into concentric circles and then of course we did some random designs that were the full length where i used the cling wrap and that was i can see some cochineal in there and other materials so again there's lots of different uses you can do beeswax wraps you can make these into napkins you can do table runners tablecloths you can even use them for quilting there are so many different options and in the end i use many of these for wrapping paper you use them for birthdays and also for christmas so all in all it was a super super fun way to make a totally renewable source of creativity in your home i hope you enjoyed this video don't forget to like and subscribe for future videos

Channel: Wildcraft Dyeing

Views: 45,523

Keywords: eco printing, ecodyeing, bundle dyeing, natural dyeing, fabric dyeing

Id: gMv1rRkP6XM

Length: 9min 2sec (542 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 23 2022