There is no shortcut to natural dye. You can rush cheap pigment through cloth in an hour, but you cannot rush a madder bath, or an indigo vat, or a walnut skin steeping in cold water for three days. The cloth tells you when it is ready, and if you do not listen, the colour will not hold.
I think about this whenever I am sourcing undyed linen. The people below work entirely on that older clock, and their work is a quiet argument for what time actually is.
Babs Behan
Babs Behan runs Botanical Inks out of Bristol, and her practice is relentlessly bioregional. She forages locally, works with plants from her own part of England, and teaches others to do the same. What I admire about her is how unsentimental she is about it. Natural dye in her hands is not a craft aesthetic. It is a system with history, economics and consequences, and she treats it with the seriousness it deserves. Her classes and books are some of the best entry points I know if anyone reading this wants to actually get their hands coloured.
Justine Aldersey-Williams
Justine Aldersey-Williams runs The Wild Dyery on the Wirral. Her indigo linen jeans — dyed with indigo she had helped grow in the UK — were one of those projects that felt like a small future opening up. If we can grow, dye and sew a garment on one island, we can do a lot more than we have been telling ourselves. Her educational work continues to unpick the myth that botanical dyeing cannot scale. It can. It simply takes another kind of patience.
Alice Burnhope
Alice Burnhope's natural dye workshops focus on botanically dyed silk, and the cloth that comes out of her studio has the specific softness of colour that has been met rather than imposed. I have learned a lot from watching her process. The colours age, which most dyers count as a loss. She counts it as life, and I think she is right. A garment whose colour moves with use and light is alive in a way a printed fabric is not.
The linen we use at Souls In Clothes is chosen in this spirit, in undyed or quietly dyed cloth that ages slowly and honestly. Handmade in Bulgaria, in the same older clock these three dyers work to.