Kate Broughton, an accomplished seamstress and self-proclaimed textile fanatic, Kate Broughton has more than twenty years experience writing on fashion and design. The founding editor of The Fashion Report and The Home Report, Broughton's articles have also appeared in Glamour magazine, Design Times, National Geographic Traveler, and Step By Step Graphics.
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Introduction:
Since earliest times, man has attempted to capture the colors of nature and use them for personal adornment. Prior to the invention of textiles, berries and clay, bark and roots were crushed and smeared on the body in primitive designs that evoked the primal elements of earth, water, fire, and air. When it was discovered that plants and pelts could be harvested and woven into material (anthropologists suggest it was as early as 10,000years ago), the same colorants that were used to paint faces, vessels, and tools were employed to decorate fabric.
As with many discoveries made by early man, it was most likely by accident that various dyeing processes were stumbled upon. Over time, accident gave way to art. Different techniques—tying, binding, stamping, waxing—and different media— bleaches, pigments, beeswax, and bean paste—were developed so that multiple colors and repeating motifs could beaded to the fabric. Although the designs produced by individual cultures possessed unique signatures, all were really variations on a few basic themes.
Textile dyeing has always been an art form in the Orient and so-called developing countries, but until the Industrial Revolution, it was not much of a priority in Western culture. Not until the refinement of dye chemistry in the late eighteenth century did Europeans and Americans realize that the actual coloration process was just as important to textile ornamentation as the weave.
Today, with the renewed value consumers are lacing on handcrafted objects, there has been virtual renaissance in the art of surface design, and it seems that everyone with a creative urge is using textile dyeing as a way to express it. Fashion designers, quilters, weavers, and interior designers are satisfying their customers’ demand for unique fabrications by dipping, spritzing, splashing, or soaking material in a new generation of dyes that possesses transparent brilliance unseen two hundred ears ago. Fine artists are trading in their easels and canvas and are painting on silk instead. Museums are commissioning dyers to create banners to hang from their rafters. The explosion of color and texture is as exuberant and powerful as the outpouring from a volcano.
This book is a celebration of that explosion. It presents a step-by-step guide for creating dyed fabrics using eight fundamental techniques, and features the work being produced by some of the world’s most accomplished textile artists, from Carter Smith’s intricately tied and discharged pieces, to David and Linda France Hartge’s fabulous representational painted silks, to Arnelle Dow’s multi-layered batik wall hangings. Many of the artists whose work is shown here—Ana Lisa Hedstrom, Judith Bird, Noel Dyrenforth—are well known in the surface design world; others are newcomers just beginning to leave their mark.
As you will see in the pages ahead, the end products of contemporary textile dyers are fresh, new, and daring, but dyeing itself remains a primal and mystical process. It is the ideal way for any artist—from novice to professional—to experience anew the wonder that came when our ancient forebears crushed those first red berries and discovered a world of infinitely colorful possibilities.
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