Color

There is something in the colors from the plants that keep you so attracted to them. It gives you comfort. It stimulates your senses that sometimes you just want to soak in that color. It might be a little scrap piece of silk, but you look at it and can’t stop – it’s like something that is encoded in that color from a plant speaks to your subconsciousness while your consciousness subsides. And you don’t have to understand anything at all, you just have to feel it.

It never happens with artificial colors. Even when you look at the color you adore, it’s different. You love it, but it’s just not the same… It lacks that feeling…

I believe it’s my third Summer when I do a lot of dyeing with plants. I can’t call myself a professional dyer who does a lot of studies and makes detailed records (if I would go that deep into dyeing, I would have to stop felting. One man can not live the lifetimes of many, no matter how you want it…) But just when I did my first samples with plants, I felt THAT. There is something that won’t let you go back too. You even don’t notice, but all artificially dyed materials little by little start to step back of your creative life and you find yourself surrounded just with what you call natural and true.

 

 

It’s my first Summer though when I collect quite a lot of dye stuff from my own land myself or use vegetable waste and medicinal herbs that have expired (I always had lots of these as this is almost the only medicine I take for more than 15 years).

 

 

St. John’s wort, sage, tansy – all growing in our fields, around us. I really love the sources that are available here… And I’ve been using them as medicinal herbs for so many years already. Strange that I didn’t think about colors before. Dyeing opens your eyes to the world. It teaches you to notice things, to cherish the world we are living in, to connect and to feel. It heals you.

 

 

And then the color meets the fiber to make a perfect duo. And makes you want to soak in it, to touch it, wander with your eyes in it, get lost and feel safe at the same time.

 

 

Comfort…