A week of Natural Dyeing and Botanical Printing in the Netherlands

I am still buzzing a bit from last week. I spent 6 days with two groups of students in The Netherlands teaching what I love so much: natural dyes and botanical printing.

Let me start with the location. I was born and raised in Amersfoort, where my family lived and still does, for many generations. The Koppelpoort is a famous landmark, and we had the studio exactly in the building next to it: Cotton Printing Studio 'De Volmolen".

In the left picture, you can see the Koppelpoort on the right side and the Volmolen is the building on the left with the two red roofs. The workshop where we held the course is the second floor with the small white windows.

The two groups this year were an international bunch, we had people joining us from: USA, Canada, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, the UK and of course; the Netherlands.

For the first course, we dived deep into the classical natural dyes of 18th century Europe, based on the recipes of Antoine Janot: Indigo, weld, madder, and cochineal. We dyed several different textiles like wool, silk, and cotton and made a sample book this way.

Of course, this means we had to learn how to scour and mordant and set up an indigo vat.

The silk chord you see here that dyes so well is

Silk Embroidery Bead Yarn 12 meter skein 100% silk

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Then we continued working with thickened mordant pastes to create patterns and to dye the samples created this way on very thin handwoven cotton. The final product was a handprinted and hand-dyed scarf

Extra Fine Handwoven Cotton Muslin Scarf 70-200cm

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For the second workshop we had a day of natural dyeing too, but this time we learned how different mordants will give different results when used with different natural dyes. Sample sets were created.

On the second day of the second workshop we sampled different mordant combinations and blankets for our botanical prints on silk charmeuse. All the participants had beautiful results to be proud of.

Silk Charmeuse 16 mommi, PFD OekoTex 140 cm wide per meter

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On the last day, we printed a large merino wool fabric. Students had to choose the combination they prefered and work on composition and folding techniques.

Organic Merino Etamine Wool Fabric per Meter, Washed PFD

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We had the most amazing time, and I am so grateful to be able to work with wonderful groups like these.

Would you like to come learn with me? I have classes coming up in the Netherlands, Switzerland, USA and Mexico. Make sure you sign up for the newsletter at the bottom of this page so I can keep you posted.