We are excited to participate in the Sustainable Cloth Challenge with the Chesapeake Fibershed. The Sustainable Cloth Challenge is a year long exploration supporting the fibershed’s goals of educating ourselves and our communities, raising our collective awareness, introducing or reinforcing new habits of consuming, fostering a sense of community, and connecting fiber producers to markets. Learn more about the Chesapeake Fibershed’s Sustainable Cloth Challenge below.

Sustainable Cloth Challenge by The Chesapeake Fibershed

Learn how to harness nature's color palette to create a wide range of color using plant based dyes. Understanding basic fiber preparation and how to extract color from plants enables us to keep garments and textiles out of landfills by investing in the longevity of our natural fibers. Whether foraging dye plants in your fibershed, growing dye plants in your garden, or purchasing dye plant extracts, natural color is all around us.

This workshop will focus heavily on mordanting techniques, how to cook raw dye material, how to use dye extracts, mixing and layering dyes to make nuanced color stories and how to keep detailed notes for repeating recipes. This event is happening on June 22nd from 11:00am to 4:00pm.

We will work with a wide range of communal dye pots during the session. This session will include mordant based dyes, as well as a short demonstration of using the indigo vat, and how to layer indigo dye with mordant dyes to widen the color spectrum of plant based dyes. The workshop will start with demos on several dye techniques and facilitate the application of these techniques on your garments, fabric or yarn.

This includes up to 5 pounds of personal items to dye. This is a great opportunity to freshen up favorites from your wardrobe that are made of cotton, linen, silk, wool, hemp and other natural fibers. Always consider checking out the thrift store a few doors down the street from us.

Participants may opt for a ticket with or without lunch. If you select the lunch option and you have any dietary restrictions, please let the coordinator know so we can accommodate.