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Bark cloth, or tapa, is not a woven material, but made from bark that has been softened through a process of soaking and beating. The inner bark is taken from several types of trees or shrubs, often mulberry and fig, and designs are applied with paints and vegetable dyes of light brown, red, and black. Bark cloth is manufactured for everyday needs such as room dividers, clothing, and floor mats, as well as ceremonial uses in weddings and funerals.

Though there are a variety of local names, the word tapa, originally from Tahiti, is commonly used to refer to bark cloth made all over the world. The Museum of Natural and Cultural History tapa cloth collection includes about 40 tapas primarily from Polynesia, including the islands of Samoa, Tonga, Hawaii, and Tahiti. While tapa cloth is most often recognized as a Polynesian craft, it has also been made in South America, Indonesia, New Guinea, Melanesia, and parts of Africa; the museum's collection includes tapas from Congo and Mozambique. The examples shown here reflect the varied designs and colors represented in the museum's holdings, from bold geometric patterns to detailed, stylized floral motifs. Images © UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History. Production of this gallery was generously supported by The Ford Family Foundation.

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Bark cloth, or tapa, is not a woven material, but made from bark that has been softened through a process of soaking and beating. The inner bark is taken from several types of trees or shrubs, often mulberry and fig, and designs are applied with paints and vegetable dyes of light brown, red, and black.

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What is Felting? Basically, it is the process of turning a protein fiber (meaning animal fiber) such as sheep wool, alpaca, mohair, yak, etc. into a piece of fabric by connecting the individual fibers.

The wool can be in any form from raw locks to processed roving or batts and there are several different methods of accomplishing this felting process so let's dive right in!

Needle Felted Goat Sculpture

First, a little background: How did we get into fiber and felting?

My love of wool and fiber began years ago when we acquired our first two alpacas, Godiva and Permanent Ink.

Well, little did I know that alpacas grow of fiber in just one year and since they are very heat sensitive, we had to shear them every Spring.

Consequently, we very quickly realized that something had to be done with all of this fiber! We ended up with bags and bags of lovely alpaca wool fiber every year. What the heck was I going to do with it all??

The first thing we did was ask our fellow alpaca breeders how they used all of their wool and surprisingly, most of them did absolutely with their fiber.

Most of them tossed the bags of fleeces in the attic because nobody had any idea what to do with them.

Personally, I did not like the idea that this wonderful natural material would go to waste. No, I wanted to turn that fiber into something wonderful.

So, after a lot of research, I discovered the world of sheep wool. What did the sheep breeders do with their wool fleeces? And that is how I was introduced to the Wonderful World of Wool Felting!

What is Felting? My Definition

Felting, in my words, is the process of producing a textile or fabric by combining and compressing the loose fibers, wool or hair.

Note: you can use fibers that are synthetic or natural. However, they won't felt exactly the same way.

Do you remember the sheets of brightly colored felt fabric that you used in kindergarten? Those are made with synthetic fibers and mass produced by some large machines.

Honestly, I don't know much about that process so in this article I will focus on working with natural fibers.

What is the Process of Felting?

To produce a piece of felt, you have to cause the hair or fibers to interlock with each other creating a matted fabric. This can be accomplished by applying water and agitation or by physically tangling the wool using special felting needles.

What is the difference between wet and dry felting?

There are two basic ways of felt making: Wet and Dry.

Wet Felting is the process of using water, soap and some form of agitation to cause the fibers to open up and then bind together. You can do this with raw wool fiber, washed fiber, carded batts, or processed wool roving and sliver.

This process also works for felting previously knitted, crocheted or woven items such as wool sweaters.

Have you ever accidentally shrunk a wool sweater by sticking it in the washer and dryer? That's a form of wet felting! And, you can actually do that on purpose.

What is Dry Felting or Needle Felting? This involves using special barbed needles to basically weave the individual fibers together until they form a matted piece of fabric.

You can do this by hand with a single needle, or with a tool using multiple needles. There are also very large machines which create felt using hundreds or even thousands of needles.

Wikipedia defines Felt as "a textile material that is produced by matting, condensing and pressing fibers together.

Felt can be made of natural fibers such as wool or animal fur, or from synthetic fibers such as petroleum-based acrylic or acrylonitrile or wood pulp-based rayon. Blended fibers are also common"

Check out How to Needle Felt for Beginners

How to Felt Wool: Wet Felting Method
The basic steps you use for the different wet felting methods are as follows:

1. Lay out thin sections of wool or roving

2. Apply soapy water

3. Work water into the fibers with your hands

4. Add a second layer, perpendicular to the first

5. Add more soapy water and work with your hands

6. Repeat steps 1-5 until the piece is thick enough for your project

7. Continue working the wool with your hands until the fiber felt and bind together

8. Full the felted fabric

How to felt wool by wet felting in detail:
Basically, the wool is arranged in perpendicular layers to make an interlocked piece of felt fabric. Then you apply water and soap and work it into the wool.

Next, the piece is manipulated with your hands, gently at first with gradually increasing pressure and agitation.

Finally, the piece is rolled up inside a matchstick blind, bubble wrap or a sisal mat. This is rolled back and forth a few hundred times to further felt the wool.

Once the wool fibers are sufficiently interlocked so they don't come apart, the Fulling stage begins. Fulling the felt fabric involves dropping and throwing it on a table.

This further shrinks and hardens the wool and creates a firm piece of felt that can be cut and sewn without raveling.

Your final felted fabric will be much smaller than the original layout of wool. How much shrinkage occurs depends on the direction of the fibers and the amount of agitation and fulling. Generally, you can count on your final piece being about 25 - 30% smaller by the time you are done felting.

Wet Felting Techniques:

Basic Wet Felting

The basic method is used for making a flat piece of felt fabric. It's appropriate for thick, sturdy pieces such as wallhangings, coats, purses and tote bags.

The steps for basic felt making are the same as described above. The only variable is how many different layers you use to achieve the desired thickness.

Check out my tutorial for Basic Feltin g.

This Wet Felting Kit contains Merino & Bamboo Blended Wool, bamboo rolling mat, soap, bubble wrap, template and instructions

Nuno Felting

What is Nuno Felting? This is a relatively new technique developed by fiber artist, Polly Stirling around 1992.

The main difference with Nuno is that an open weave fabric is incorporated into the felt. This can be a super lightweight silk chiffon or a heavier muslin or even burlap depending on how heavy you want your finished piece to be.

During the nuno process, the wool fibers work their way through the fabric thereby interlocking and bonding the two materials. The Fulling process creates a wrinkled effect. Nuno is the perfect technique for making very flowy and lightweight wool shawls, scarves or even curtains.

Here is my tutorial on the Nuno Felting Method

Cobweb Felting

Cobweb is also a flat technique. The wool is laid out in various thicknesses so that the final felt fabric has a lot of texture with thick and thin areas and even holes. The fiber has to be thoroughly felted and fulled to make sure the piece does not come apart.

Cobweb is a good technique for scarves, shawls, wraps and wall hangings.

How to Felt Wool with the Cobweb Felting Method

Lattice Felting

Lattice Wet Felting means just what is says - creating felt fabric with a lattice pattern. A flat method which makes beautiful scarves, shawls and wraps.

There are two different techniques for creating the lattice felt:

1. Felting a piece of fabric and then cutting out the "negative" areas, leaving the lattice work.
2. Laying out the wool in a lattice pattern in the beginning.

The first method is a bit easier, especially for beginning feltmakers. The second method is a little more challenging since you have to work the individual strands.

Learn How to Make Lattice Felt

3D Felting

3 Dimensional means any wool felted piece that is not flat such as a bowl, hat or slippers. Generally, you felt over a mold or support of some kind such as a bowl for hats and vases. I've also seen hats felted over balloons.

It's also possible to create 3D pieces using a Resist (next section).

Here's how I created Wet Felted Easter Eggs
This Needle Felting Kit contains: natural color wool, glass eyes, two felting needles, felting cushion, detailed instructions with photographs

Resist Felting

The Resist Felting Process uses a barrier of some sort to keep certain areas from bonding together. Often, this is can be a sheet of heavy plastic. The Resist is placed between layers of wool which are then felted. When the Resist is removed, there will be two separate layers of felt.

This method can be used to make 3D felt objects such a bowls or cat caves and it can be used to give flat pieces some dimension and texture.

Here is how to Make a Felt Bowl with the Resist Method

Felted Slippers made with a Resist

Those are the main Wet Felting Techniques which can also be combined to create various textures and effects. For instance, I often combine the Nuno and Cobweb Techniques in my shawls to give them structure with the fabric but also make the shawls lightweight by thinning out the wool.
Here are a few other projects:
How to make Wool Dryer Balls - an eco friendly alternative to using dryer sheets or tennis balls to dry your laundry.

Felted Soaps - a great project for beginners. Also a fun way to introduce children to wool.

Wet Felting Supplies

Disclosure: This page may contain affiliate links which means if you click and buy,
we may receive a small commission. See full Disclosure for details.

Wool Fiber

Wool fiber or Protein aka animal fiber includes sheep wool, alpaca, mohair (goat), cat fur, dog, human hair ... all of those are protein fibers.

This can be in any form such as raw wool, washed raw wool, roving or carded fiber and locks as well as yarn.

This is , perfect for super soft scarves and shawls.

For beginning felters, Knit Picks has affordable roving in white or multi colors. They also carry a line of Feltable Yarns.

This Complete Kit includes everything you need to get started!

FAQ about Wool:

Can I felt with Synthetic Wool?

If you look at a single hair from a sheep under a microscope, you'll notice that it is not smooth. There are scales along the shaft of the hair. Hot water causes those scales to open up.

When you apply hot water to a bunch of sheep wool, the barbs on the individual hairs open and attach to each other.

Can I Wet Felt with Cotton or Silk Fiber?

Cotton is a plant fiber which is smooth and does not have scales so it will not adhere to other fibers with this process. While Silk is a protein fiber, highly processed silk is also very smooth and does not felt well.

It is possible, however, to "trap" non-felting fibers within wool for added texture or a pop of color.

Matchstick Blind or Bubble Wrap

If you're going to make this a hobby or perhaps a side job, I highly recommend you get a Matchstick Blind to help you with the hard rolling back and forth of your pieces. Matchstick Blinds also give you the option of making larger pieces and they tend to last a long time. Just make sure to buy an unstained blind vs. a dyed or stained blind.

If, however you only want to make a few, smaller pieces of felt, Bubble Wrap will be sufficient. It's a bit more slippery to work with (especially when wet), but it will do the job.

Water Sprayer

You will need a sprinkler of some sort to wet your wool fiber. The important thing here is that you want to be able to control how much water is applied at a time.

When I first began felt making, I used an old vinegar bottle with holes punched in the cap. This worked just fine for a while but getting the flow of water right can be a bit tricky.

For my larger pieces, I bought an inexpensive Garden Sprayer. These usually hold 1 gallon of water which is great when you are making a large shawl or wallhanging. The nozzle can be adjusted to control the flow of water.

A great option for small pieces is a Bottle Cap Sprinkler which fits on water bottles as well as 2 liter soda bottles.

Felting Soap

There are many different opinions about which soap is best to use. Honestly, I've tried a wide variety of soaps from solid to liquid, expensive and cheap soaps. All of them will work fine but there are some other considerations.

Some felters swear by this Olive Oil Soap because it works really well and it keeps your skin from drying out. Plus, if you are using soft water, Olive Oil Soap will be much easier to wash out of your felt fabric.

Here in Kentucky, the water is very hard so rinsing is not as much of an issue for me. Normally, I use clear liquid dish soap and/or plain Ivory soap bars. Stay away from any colored soaps, though. They usually have dyes which can discolor your wool.

Other than that, the only items you will need are a sturdy table, plastic table covers, some old towels and bits of nylon hose for tying your rolled matchstick blind.

Let's move on to Needle Felting!

How to Felt Wool: Needle Felting

What is Needle Felting?

With Needle Felting, you use special, barbed needles to tangle the fibers together until they form a matted piece of wool. The needles are repeatedly pushed through layers of wool.

Needle Felting Tool

This can be done by hand with a single or multiple needles or it can be done by machine. There are a variety of machines available from smaller, hand held models to larger tabletop felting machines type models.

Larger felting machines or looms utilize hundreds or even thousands of needles to produce very large pieces of felted fabric.

CAUTION: This is NOT a suitable activity for children. These needles are super sharp and can be dangerous.

Needle Felting Techniques:

The basic felting process is the same regardless of the technique used. One or more needles are repeatedly pushed through wool and back out again. Over and over which causes the fibers to mat together.

If you're using a special mat or foam underneath your piece, you'll have to lift your wool off the mat occasionally as the fibers will penetrate the mat.

There are basically two different techniques: Flat and Three Dimensional Felting

Flat Needle Felting

Just as the name implies ... this means making a flat piece of felt fabric. You can make a sheet of felt consisting of felted wool fibers alone or you can needle felt on top of another piece of fabric.

You can also make shaped felt pieces by using cookie cutters or other molds to shape your felt as you work.

And you're not limited to loose wool. Yarn, roving, silk sliver or other felt can be needle felted onto other pieces as decoration.

This technique works great for making scarves, decorating pillow cases, wallhangings or purses.

Here is a video which shows you how to make Needle Felted Embellishments. Also, this video shows you the basic steps.

Check out how to make a Needle Felted Pincushion using a Felted Dryer Ball and dyed wool locks.

3 Dimensional Needle Felting
Soft Sculptures
Needle felted soft sculptures seem to be all the rage these days! This fiber art form has really become popular among crafters.

I see a lot of wool animal sculptures, faces, gnomes, Santas, mushrooms, you name it. Some of these little felted sculptures look almost life like.

Personally, I have not attempted to make animals or sculptures but that is definitely on my to do list. I did find a few great basic tutorials.

This video shows you how to make a needle felted sheep.

Here's a great tutorial on How to Needle Felt a Penguin

This tutorial shows you how to Make a Miniature Needle Felted Dog

This is a very good article on How to Needle Felt which outlines 3 different techniques.

Needle Felting Supplies:

Disclosure: This page may contain affiliate links which means if you click and buy,
we may receive a small commission. See full Disclosure for details.

If you're just learning how to needle felt, you may want to get an all in one needle felting kit. Hint: Make sure that the kit you choose also contains the needles. I've seen some that only contain wool roving and instructions.

Felting Wool or Roving

Unlike with wet techniques, the wool you use for needle felting does not necessarily have to be a protein aka animal fiber. Since you are not relying on the scales of the protein fiber to interlock, synthetic wool can be used.

However, animal fiber such as sheep wool may needle felt easier since the fibers are not a slick as a nylon fiber, for instance.

Wool comes in many different forms from raw, unwashed wool to processed roving and yarn. Any of these fibers will work just fine.

Wool roving comes in many natural and dyed colors and is easy to work with. Yarn is good for embellishments and decorations but keep in mind that you may need to use heavier gauge needles.

If you're just starting out, you may find wool roving easier to work with than raw wool fiber.

Felting Needles

As I explained above, these are special needles which have barbs and notches along the sides to help grab the wool. Felting needles come in various sizes or gauges. The larger the gauge number, the finer the needle.

Finer needles are useful for smaller projects or more detailed felted sculptures or embellishments. They will not leave holes.

Larger needles are good when you need to make a bigger piece or you are using coarser fiber. They will leave holes in your finished felt.

For small pieces, you can simply use one needle or a pen style felting tool, which holds 3 needles. For bigger projects, you will want a larger tool which uses 5 or more needles. They're available with fine or heavy tipped needles, so pay attention to your needle gauge.

As I mentioned previously, these needles are wicked sharp and therefore I also recommend that you use Finger Protectors.

Foam or Mat

What is Felting Foam? Foam or Mats are the base that you place under your project. As you push the needles through the wool, they will stab into the felting mat.

This protects not only you, but also the needles which are somewhat delicate and break easily.

If you're just starting out and want to save money, you can use a large sponge as a underlayment or mat. These are inexpensive and readily available at any big box or auto part store.

Just be aware though, that sponges are not as firm as felting mats so you may want to lay something tougher underneath. Also, sponges are not as durable and won't last as long as a mat, but for a beginner, they will work just fine.

Specialized Felting Mats come in a variety of sizes and materials from woolen to dense foam. Some people prefer to use Mat Brushes.

They all serve the same basic purpose. I think the main difference is how much of the wool gets embedded in the mat and how well the mat holds up to the needles.

A few additional thoughts:

Where Can I Find Wool?

Sources of wool other than online ordering:
Fiber and Wool Festivals are usually fun gatherings of many fiber producers and vendors.

Wool Festivals give you the advantage of meeting and talking with the farmers or fiber producers to find out about their animals and the wool.

You can see and touch a large variety of fibers from angora to alpaca to buffalo and yak wool. Plus, you usually have the option of purchasing an entire fleece or just small amounts.

Local Yarn Shops are fun places to browse and usually carry felting supplies. Bonus ... it's always good to support small businesses.

Where Can I Learn Other Techniques?

Workshops
When you are just starting out, YouTube videos and tutorials are a great place to learn how to felt, however they can't compare to hands-on learning.

Classes or Workshops are definitely the best (and most fun) way for you to learn. Not only do you get one-on-one attention from the instructor, but you also get to meet wonderful people with the same interests.

I recommend you check your local yarn shops and fiber festivals for workshop schedules.

Is Felting an Expensive Hobby?

As with most things, that totally depends on you! If you use ultra fine alpaca fiber to felt a large shawl, for instance, that can get expensive. On the other hand, it is possible to make smaller pieces for just a few dollars.

Needle Felting is, in general, less expensive. And, once you acquire the felting needles and pad, the only thing you need to replace is the wool. This needle felting kit is a great buy for beginners!
There you have it ... everything you need to know to get started with this wonderful craft. I hope you give this fun fiber art a try! Basic Felting
Nuno Technique
Cobweb Felting
Lattice Method
3D or Resist
Felted Dryer Balls
Wet Felted Easter Eggs
Soap Felting
How to Needle Felt (for Beginners)
DIY Wool Dryer Balls with Needle Felt Designs
Enjoy!
Annette
FiberArtsy

What is Felting? A Beginner's Guide

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What is Felting? A Beginners Guide to Wool Felting

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What is Felting? Basically, it is the process of turning a protein fiber (meaning animal fiber) such as sheep wool, alpaca, mohair, yak, etc. into a piece of fabric by connecting the individual fibers. The wool can be in any form from raw locks to processed roving or batts and there are several different methods of accomplishing this felting process so let's dive right in!

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Jeremy Dutcher - Mehcinut (Official Music Video)

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Image courtesy Klaus Pichler

Here are six different artists who are inspired by mold. There's something powerful about this kind of artwork. It challenges us into questioning how something so repulsive can be seen as beautiful. How do you feel when you look at something you usually regard as vile and see it through an artist's eyes?

Klaus Pichler makes rotting food look majestic. So much so, it looks like it should belong on Miss Havisham's dining table. The work titled One Third comments on global food waste, highlighting that roughly ⅓ of all food is wasted. Pichler wants to remind us that there's over 925 million people in the world who are threatened with starvation.

By changing the levels of oxygen, light, and temperature, [Antoine Bridier-Nahmias](http://Antoine Bridier-Nahmias) grows beautiful arrays of micro-organisms due to random contamination. His project titled Magical Contamination archives photos of bacteria and yeast in Petri dishes to wondrous surprise.

The world as we know it is perishable. Johanna Mårtensson builds moldy bread into cities of abandon. The project speaks to the world abandoned by humans and left to rot without humanity's maintenance. Mårtensson describes her project as, "Another picture of what might happen when the show is over." It's a chilling portrayal of what might happen if humankind suddenly vanished.

Elin Thomas crochets and sews mold patterns into fabric and they look as though they've come straight from the lab. Every detail of the layers and textures are depicted, and her pieces capture the characteristics of fungus and bacteria brilliantly while making Petri dishes look cute.

Constructing his fairy-tale building with black paper, flour, and mold, Daniele Del Nero creates what looks like haunted houses or city blocks in ruin. These pieces create a chilling story; making us question the environments in which we live, and the memories that the buildings we reside in hold.

Using an array of strange mediums including sugar, cotton and wool, Gemma Schiebe makes mixed media sculptures but also video and photographs of decay in process. She says, "There is a strange juxtaposition going on between the perfectly formed fruit and the fake decay moldy looking exterior."
Artist Grows Mold in a Sponge-Filled Room Scientists Are Making Music with Slime Mold and Whale Songs 3D Printed Popsicles Turn Cacti And Disease Into Tasty Treats

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Bacteria and yeast become these artists’ generative materials.

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Spring 2021 SDJ: Looped & Knotted: Contemporary Basketry, Out Now! - Surface Design Association

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Surface Design Association is excited to announce Looped & Knotted: Contemporary Basketry, our Spring 2021 edition of Surface Design Journal. This issue, developed in collaboration with the National Basketry Organization and Guest Editor Carol Eckert, explores all the different ways artists express…

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Crafting Lineage, Tanya Aguiñiga — Art21

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Shown at work in and around her studio in Los Angeles, California, Tanya Aguiñiga revisits the paths that place her work amongst a history of creative traditions, forging her own journey to making work that speaks to a wider audience.

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Artists Changing Expectations of What Tapestry Can Be

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Artists Changing Expectations of What Tapestry Can Be

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don't miss slide show in article

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"Along with cave paintings, threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning," Anni Albers wrote in her canonical 1965 tome On Weaving. Considered by many to be the godmother of textile arts, Albers dedicated her book to her "great teachers"-the weavers of ancient Peru. The basic principles of tapestry-typically wall hangings defined by complicated pictorial designs formed by warp-and-weft weaving or embroidery-has not changed for millennia, despite the introduction of power machinery in the late 18th century.

Contemporary artists who have dared to take up the painstaking labor of weaving in the digital age similarly find themselves in dialogue with newly minted historical figures like Albers-who was instrumental in elevating the status of weaving as a fine art-as well as ancient traditions that span the globe.

Across cultures, tapestry has been used for practical, decorative, spiritual, and expressive purposes. The highly developed textile culture of ancient Peru emerged in the absence of a written language. In the Middle East, tapestries were often thought to possess magical properties; think of tales of flying carpet rides. The famously cryptic symbolism of the medieval Unicorn Tapestries has subsumed their practical purpose of keeping drafts out the Eureopan castle it once inhabited. In the 20th century, feminist artists employed handcrafts like weaving and embroidery to break down the distinctions between art and craft that typicallly left women and people of color marginalized as mere "artisans."

These days, fiber artists have found increasingly receptive audiences, as well as institutions willing to show their work. They employ tapestry to explore politics and the harsh realities of modern conflict, or to tease out questions of identity and sexuality. Many bemoan tapestry's glacially slow pace and the way it hampers their abilities to be prolific, yet none would trade the hand-made, unique approach. Below, we share insights from seven artists who are continuing to push the boundaries of this traditional medium.

The diverse traditions of West African Strip weaving, Flemish tapestry, and early American story quilts combine in Diedrick Brackens's viscerally personal textiles. His works frequently comment on his identity as a queer, Black American.

The Los Angeles-based artist, originally from Texas, takes advantage of weaving's great cultural capacity for storytelling and material symbolism. The threads of his figurative narratives derive from folklore, religion, mythical creatures, cosmology, and the artist's own lived experience. Brackens's choice of materials adds further gravity to his imagery: Besides commercial dyes, the artist employs colorants such as wine, tea, and bleach to stain textiles like cotton, a loaded material that points to the transatlantic slave trade.

Brackens has a thoughtful way of entwining social, political, and personal issues through a medium that has become at once contemporary and traditional. "Textile work is exciting audiences again because the field of makers has expanded," the artist told me. "It is an expansive space where women, queer people, and Black and brown folks have made huge contributions historically and presently."

The artist's tapestries are certainly getting attention: Brackens won the 2018 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize presented by the Studio Museum in Harlem, and his latest works are currently on view in "Diedrick Brackens: Darling Divined" in the New Museum 's lobby galleries.

The speed and prosaicness of contemporary female life find eternal stillness and glory in tapestries by Brooklyn-based Erin M. Riley. The artist's distinctive tattoos appear in woven depictions of her mirror selfies, tweezing nipple hairs, masturbating. The digital sphere is further invoked by Pornhub screenshots and scattered iPhones.

Riley was raised on the internet, and her tapestries reflect her experiences "as a queer human who grew up in chat rooms" as a means of exploring sexuality and trauma. The artist frequently depicts herself in what some might consider compromising or revealing situations to evince "the physical labor and presence of body that it takes to depict them."

"The images I weave are consumed and scrolled past at a speed that is maddening, but tapestry stays slow," Riley said. At the same time, the process of sitting at the loom "allows for a total disconnect from the internet while also having a connection to binary and early computer technology."

The reflective nature of the loom process allows Riley to zoom in on specific details-she often hand-dyes the yarn for each specific object-as a way to slow down the viewer and confront content that might be previously scrolled past.

"I'm lucky to live in a time when people don't get pigeonholed into just one craft," said Terri Friedman. The Bay Area-based artist only learned to weave five years ago, when she was inspired by a Joan Miró weaving she saw on a trip to Barcelona. Because she came to weaving late in life, after pursuing other mediums like painting and sculpture, Friedman doesn't "identify solely as a weaver," and prefers to be considered an interdisciplinary artist.

"I use the loom to catch my big hairy voluptuous colorful paintings," she explained, adding that she uses the palette of a painter. Instead of finding inspiration in the works of other textile artists, Friedman, a self-described feminist, looks to female painters like Joanne Greenbaum, Keltie Ferris, Nicole Eisenman, and Sarah Cain. She is most interested in their unusual palettes, and is "obsessed with color."

The undulating, uneven patterns of the wall works Friedman has created in these past five years slightly resemble the disheveled elegance of the bright and busy Coogi sweaters popular in the 1990s. They are "unstable, uncertain, and unmonumental," she explained-humble, fragile qualities that inspire Friedman. "The work does not strive for perfection in a traditional craft sense, but more for emotion and storytelling in an abstract way," she said.

Despite their resemblance to Color Field paintings, the majority of Brent Wadden's fractured, geometric works are made up of woven panels that he sews together and stretches tight over wooden stretchers. The artist studied painting as an undergraduate before teaching himself how to weave, yet he hasn't abandoned the abstract gestures that dominate the canvases of the great mid-century painters.

While prolific artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, or Bridget Riley might produce a piece in hours or days, Wadden has taken abstraction in a slower-paced direction. These days, Wadden's biggest challenge is the time it takes to produce a work: "It's a big commitment," he said. But weaving at a loom also satisfies the artist's urge to make a tactile, one-of-a-kind objects by hand.

The influences Wadden cites are not the painters mentioned above. Traditional folk art from Nova Scotia, where he grew up, possesses "an honesty" that he tries to cultivate in his own practice. To that end, Wadden's cardinal interest is in "embracing the mistakes that happen along the way." As a self-taught weaver, he may find that his composition "doesn't properly align," or the yarn he's using runs out, leading to variations in tone and color.

Aiko Tezuka likes to make the material structures of her fiber works transparent. Kitschy patterned fabrics dissolve into streams of colorful, unspooled threads that spill out across the wall or across the floor as the two ends of her patterned fabric, manipulated into traditional canvas shapes over wooden bars, remain intact.

Although the tightly woven structures of textiles are usually hidden or overlooked, Tezuka believes "the completed body can return back to be its materials," she said. The tactile, sculptural, and "undone" nature of her works wrestle with the distinction between art forms, especially so-called "high art" and "low craft." Tezuka's pieces break down these hierarchies, an endeavor that is paramount to her creative freedom.

Tezuka even turned an academic eye to the subject; her Ph.D. dissertation, which she earned from Kyoto City University of Arts in 2005, explored the history of fine art and craft and the origin of their separation. Although Tezuka is based in Berlin, her Japanese background informs this research. In Japan, Tezuka explained, the border between painting and weaving and embroidery was created in the late 19th century, when the isolated country's ports opened to the rest of the world. To hurry modernization, Japanese artists imitated European culture, including the prioritization of painting over craft. Tezuka continues to cross these lines in her most recent works, now on view in "Afternoon of Abundance" at Szydłowski Gallery in Warsaw.

Unlike the refined, even stitching of the tapestries that hang in medieval museums, San Francisco-based artist Josh Faught delights in the messy, knotty potentials of weaving. He employs an eccentric range of materials into his hand-woven pieces so that they edge away from tapestry to become catch-alls that can incorporate varied textiles from cotton to gaudy gold lamé; cultural detritus like VHS tapes and nail polish; and archival materials.

"Textiles are a wonderful way for me to communicate conflicting impulses through an often epic scale," Faught explained of his hodgepodge approach to the medium. "Through weaving and crochet, soap operas, AIDS vigils, candy baskets, and codes of décor are forced to negotiate a psychic space between the idiosyncratic and the symbolic." Faught's creative display methods add to this controlled chaos. He has shown his "tapestries" on the wall and propped up against it; or as a sculpture, on metal supports and standing miraculously upright on the floor.

Faught, who is an associate professor and chair of textiles at the California College of the Arts, is excited by the current expansion of tapestry's traditional definition. "Textiles have always been a platform from which we can share marginalized stories and experiences through the subjugation and celebration of errant threads," Faught said. In his own work, the artist "considers how we can instrumentalize these experiences through an understanding of tapestry not just as an object, but as a tool, a cloth, and site of performance."

The distinctions between weaving and painting become nearly obsolete in Julia Bland's epic wall works. Loom-woven textiles are patched and painted over in oil; bits of canvas and fabrics like silk, wool, and velvet are crocheted or sutured together; hand-braided ropes climb through the complex compositions that are often nearly 7-foot-tall squares.

The Brooklyn-based artist described the process behind her intricate, handcrafted painting-textile hybrids as "a series of events that combine and dissolve." She added that "in the end, it is impossible to parse out what exactly happened or how, what came first or what came last."

Although Bland said the images and patterns of her compositions arise from an inexact process of handling her materials, the colorful and complex works always seem to find order in their usually symmetrical, geometric structures.

But it's the "rich and vast, and overwhelmingly deep" history of textiles that the artist finds most difficult to negotiate. "Tapestry can be a way of combining, referencing, contradicting, breaking, repairing, contracting, expanding," Bland said. "The history is rich and vast, but we don't have to relive it. We can make something different."

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7 Artists Weaving New Tapestry Traditions | Artsy

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Contemporary artists reflect on the traditions of tapestry, taking new approaches to weaving, and using the art form to address contemporary issues.

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The Web of Connections symposium brings together artists from and to share their work and exchange on the common topics and themes from these two exhibitions curated by Nicole Burisch and Sally Frater . This online gathering will include presentations and workshops around the intersections of technology, textiles, craft, and materiality.

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Time lapse video of Tanabe Chikuunsai IV's “Connection” installation being made at the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco)

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Time lapse video of Tanabe Chikuunsai IV's “Connection” installation being made at the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco)

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Tanabe Chikuunsai IV: Connection is organized by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Presentation is made possible with the generous support of Ken Lamb, Alexandra and Dennis Lenehan, the Lloyd E. Cotsen Endowment for the study of Japanese bamboo arts, and the James M. Gerstley Fund for International Exhibitions. This exhibition is a part of Today's Asian Voices, which is made possible with the generous support of Salle E. Yoo and Jeffrey P. Gray. Additional support is provided by The Japan Foundation.

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Tanabe Chikuunsai IV: Connection - Exhibitions - Asian Art Museum

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Tanabe Chikuunsai IV: Connection is organized by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Presentation is made possible with the generous support of Ken Lamb, Alexandra and Dennis Lenehan, the Lloyd E. Cotsen Endowment for the study of Japanese bamboo arts, and the James M. Gerstley Fund for International Exhibitions.

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In this video, the youtuber uses the acronym inc (meaning INCREASE) instead of the Calamity-Free Crochet book author who uses  2 sc in next sc (meaning 2 single crochet in the next single crochet -or next stitch-). These two ways of writing the pattern mean the same thing. Follow one or the other and make sure you do not get confused.

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Amigurumi Basics for Beginners (Amigurumi 101) | Amigurumi Tutorial

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How to Single Crochet Increase - Crochet Increase - Stitch Guide

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Single Crochet Stitch - Beginner Course: Lesson #6

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How to Crochet in the Round: Starting Methods: Magic Ring, Chain Method

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How to Crochet in the Round: Starting Methods: Magic Ring, Chain Method

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How to Crochet in the Round: Starting Methods: Magic Ring, Chain Method

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How to Make Chainless Foundation Crochet Stitches

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How to Make Chainless Foundation Crochet Stitches

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CROCHET LIKE A PRO - How to Make Chainless Foundation Crochet Stitches

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Beginner Crochet - Slipknot and Foundation Chain

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Beginner Crochet - Slipknot and Foundation Chain

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How To Crochet: Beginner Crochet Series Lesson 1 Getting Started

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Animated Knots - glossary and instructions

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Animated Knots - glossary and instructions

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This selection of over 100 of the best rope knots is for use by boaters, paddlers, scouts, search and rescue, arborists, climbers and all outdoor pursuits. It includes a large range of camping knots and essential utility knots. Although there are literally thousands of different knots, the knots illustrated and animated here include the best knots from the four primary knot categories: (make a loop in the rope), (rope to rope knots), (rope to object knots) and Binding Knots.

We have also grouped knots that are common to various applications such as Arborist Knots, Boating Knots, Climbing Knots and Knots useful in Search and Rescue. You can also use the Search box above to search the site for any specific knot name that you are looking for.

Bear in mind that it is far more important to learn a few knots well than to half learn a whole bunch of knots!

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This selection of over 100 of the best rope knots is for use by boaters, paddlers, scouts, search and rescue, arborists, climbers and all outdoor pursuits. It includes a large range of camping knots and essential utility knots.

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Safety guidelines for Fine Arts students working from home

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Safety guidelines for Fine Arts students working from home

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Skip to main content

Concordia University
https://www.concordia.ca/content/concordia/en/finearts/facilities/health-and-safety/safety-guidelines-for-fine-arts-students-working-from-home.html

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Safety guidelines for Fine Arts students working from home

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To ‘Make Ink’ You Just Need To Look Down Around Your Feet

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NPR’s Ari Shapiro explores the city of Washington, D.C., with artist Jason Logan, and author of Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking, to urban forage for materials to make ink.

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SLOW STITCH: MINDFUL AND CONTEMPLATIVE TEXTILE ART - CLAIRE WELLESLY-SMITH

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SLOW STITCH: MINDFUL AND CONTEMPLATIVE TEXTILE ART - CLAIRE WELLESLY-SMITH

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A brilliant book

This is the first book I have read of this sort, and what a great book it is. Its very well written, extremely interesting with a nice blend of history and technique and encourages you to have a go at slow stitching and how to go about it. Its really inspired me and I very much recommend it.

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A brilliant book This is the first book I have read of this sort, and what a great book it is. Its very well written, extremely interesting with a nice blend of history and technique and encourages you to have a go at slow stitching and how to go about it.

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THE SECRET LIVES OF COLOR - KASSIA ST.CLAIR

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THE SECRET LIVES OF COLOR - KASSIA ST.CLAIR

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While the edges of the pages roughly match the color being discussed, they are not essential to the content. I have a hard copy of the book, so I can While the edges of the pages roughly match the color being discussed, they are not essential to the content. I have a hard copy of the book, so I can tell you it doesn't make that much difference. The real interest is in the stories and history associated with the colors the author has chosen to include. Also, given the vagueries of print, most of the colored edges of the pages are not true to the actual color - or at least not as accurate as the pigments themselves in either acrylic or oil palettes. Gregory Weisler...more (less)

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While the edges of the pages roughly match the color being discussed, they are not essential to the content. I have a hard copy of the book, so I can While the edges of the pages roughly match the color being discussed, they are not essential to the content.

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Des goûts et des couleurs avec Michel Pastoureau

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Des goûts et des couleurs avec Michel Pastoureau

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Les couleurs ne sont jamais là par hasard, elles véhiculent des sens cachés, des codes, des tabous ou des préjugés. Elles pèsent sur notre vie quotidienne, notre langage et notre imaginaire. Elles ne sont ni immuables ni universelles et ont une histoire mouvementée. Récit avec le médiéviste français, spécialiste de la symbolique des couleurs Michel Pastoureau.

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Des goûts et des couleurs avec Michel Pastoureau - série de podcasts à écouter - France Culture

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Les couleurs ne sont jamais là par hasard, elles véhiculent des sens cachés, des codes, des tabous ou des préjugés. Elles pèsent sur notre vie quotidienne, notre langage et notre imaginaire. Elles ne sont ni immuables ni universelles et ont une histoire...

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Ramassage ou livraison

Nous préparons vos commandes en ligne tous les jours!

Placez votre commande en ligne et choisissez l'option de ramassage gratuit en magasin pour la récupérer dès le lendemain.
Ou choisissez l'option de livraison: en vélo, en auto ou en camion, votre commande se rendra chez vous rapidement et gratuitement (pour toute commande de 65$ et plus!)

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Le meilleur magasin de laine en ligne et à Montréal - La Bobineuse

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Ramassage ou livraison Nous préparons vos commandes en ligne tous les jours! Placez votre commande en ligne et choisissez l'option de ramassage gratuit en magasin pour la récupérer dès le lendemain.Ou choisissez l'option de livraison: en vélo, en auto ou en camion, votre commande se rendra chez vous rapidement et gratuitement (pour toute commande de 65$ et plus!)

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Heures d'ouvertures

La boutique est ouverte tous les jours, du samedi au mercredi de midi à 17h, et le jeudi et vendredi de midi à 18h. La cueillette est possible tous les jours de 10h à 17h et nous sommes disponibles par téléphone de 10h à 17h.

Adresse

751 rue Gilford, Montréal (Qc), Canada, H2J 1N8

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La boutique est ouverte tous les jours, du samedi au mercredi de midi à 17h, et le jeudi et vendredi de midi à 18h. La cueillette est possible tous les jours de 10h à 17h et nous sommes disponibles par téléphone de 10h à 17h.

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Textiles Couture Elle (St-Hubert street - wool)

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Textiles Couture Elle (St-Hubert street - wool)

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Welcome to the Maurice Brassard & Fils web site. We are a family business that for more than 40 years, provide to weavers and knitters a large diversity of yarns across North America.

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UPDATED Nov 2021 - Our Toronto store is open between the hours of 9am-2pm. We work later most days so you can set an appointment after 2pm if needed. We are working as a warehouse now with limited browsing space. Pre-ordering is highly recommended and appreciated.

For your convenience, you can still order online for Canada Post delivery or you can request to use Penguin PickUp in the Shopping Cart. Penguin runs a handy distribution service with more convenient times so you can get your orders picked up at over 18 locations in the GTA.

G&S Dye and Accessories Ltd. is the source for textile design supplies in North America. Along with a wide range of natural silk, cotton and linen fabrics, we also carry over twenty brands of dyes, paints or inks with all sorts of services and auxiliary supplies for silk painting, screen printing, marbling, T-shirt painting, fabric printing, tie-dyeing, batik, stenciling and many others surface design supplies. With over thirty years of experience, we can provide the expertise and customer service to help you with any project you have in mind.

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G&S Dye and Accessories Ltd. is the source for textile design supplies in North America. Along with a wide range of natural silk, cotton and linen fabrics, we also carry over twenty brands of dyes, paints or inks with all sorts of services and auxiliary supplies for silk painting, screen printing, marbling, T-shirt painting, fabric printing, tie-dyeing, batik, stenciling and many others surface design supplies.

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A large variety of natural dyes, plant indigo, textile art supplies, organic blanks, bandanas, scarves & shawls, hand block printed fabrics. Maiwa's slow clothes & sustainable bedding lines are naturally dyed, featuring handwoven cloth, organic cotton, linen and wild silk, and are ethically made on a small scale.

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Best sellers Relevance Name, A to Z Name, Z to A Price, low to high Price, high to low

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Alchimiste en herbe - Herboristerie à Montréal

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L’Alchimiste en herbe est une petite boutique chaleureuse qui se spécialise dans les plantes médicinales et autres approches alternatives de guérison.

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Habi Habi - Indigo leaves, seeds, and more!

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Habi Habi - Indigo leaves, seeds, and more!

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Le Centre offre aux professionnels de s'approvisionner en matières colorantes et auxiliaires de qualité.

Certaines conditions s'appliquent, le Centre se réserve le droit de limiter l'accès aux équipements et aux produits pour des raisons de sécurité et de préséances.
Les commandes de produits doivent toujours être passées par téléphone ou par courriel avant de vous déplacer.
Pour nous joindre par téléphone: 514-939-2150
ou par courriel: services@designtextile.qc.ca
N.B : Les prix sont sujets à changements sans préavis.
Il est de votre responsabilité d'effectuer tous les tests nécessaires pour avant d'utiliser nos produits. La documentation n'est fournie sur demande qu'à titre indicatif.

Nous ne saurions être tenus pour responsable des dommages liés à l'utilisation de nos produits.

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Le Centre offre aux professionnels de s'approvisionner en matières colorantes et auxiliaires de qualité. Certaines conditions s'appliquent, le Centre se réserve le droit de limiter l'accès aux équipements et aux produits pour des raisons de sécurité et de préséances. Les commandes de produits doivent toujours être passées par téléphone ou par courriel avant de vous déplacer.

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Kama pigments is a Canadian company founded in 1996 that specializes in the sale and manufacture of specialized artists' materials. On our site you will find materials and resources for: visual arts, decorative arts, cabinet making, violin making, gilding and artwork restoration and conservation.

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Facebook: Creative Re-use: Ø Waste C.R.Ø.W

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Facebook: Creative Re-use: Ø Waste C.R.Ø.W

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Facebook: Veux-tu ça toi ? c'est à donner à Montréal

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Facebook: Veux-tu ça toi ? c'est à donner à Montréal

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Veux-tu ça toi ? c'est à donner 😊 Montréal

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C'est un groupe de don tout est gratuit.

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Sign In/Sign Up Edit Profile Logout Educational Portal

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Speedball Intaglio, Monotype & Block Printing Supplies

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Second hand art store based in Montreal, Quebec. Working to make art accessible and sustainable.

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Montreal art materials, For the love of art and artists across Canada! The best service and advice for art supplies in Montreal.

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Arts - Matériel d’art pour artistes | Coop UQAM

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Art Supply Store on campus carries hundreds of quality products at affordable prices for all creative needs: from fine art supplies, tools and presentation materials to frames and supports, including an extensive selection of fine art paper.

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Photographing 2D & 3D Artwork - ArtProf.org - comprehensive!

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Photographing 2D & 3D Artwork - ArtProf.org - comprehensive!

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How To Photograph YOUR ART: 2D & 3D Artwork

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Natural Indigo Dyeing Iron Vat How To Video

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Graham Keegan is a natural dye resource: an advocate for natural color, teaching classes, growing and giving away plants. In addition to providing custom dye services, we have a line of apparel, bags and accessories, each hand dyed and constructed at the shop in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California. We care for and consider every step in the creation of every piece. From printed pattern leather to hand-waxed denim to plant dyed wools, cottons, silks and linens, beauty and integrity of materials are our primary concerns. Take a look around to see our newest products and the careful steps that we take to create them.

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Graham Keegan is a natural dye resource: an advocate for natural color, teaching classes, growing and giving away plants. In addition to providing custom dye services, we have a line of apparel, bags and accessories, each hand dyed and constructed at the shop in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California.

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What are Lake Pigments & How to Make Them (Re-Upload)

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From cups to grams to eggs, in cooking and in science, numbers need units to be measurements. Different countries use different volume and mass measurements, and converting between them when you're up to your elbows in a recipe can be a challenge-but we're here to help.

Try the Conversion Calculator for a specific value or use the tables below.

*US dry volumes are a different system than US liquid volumes. Confusingly, they are also named (dry) pints and (dry) quarts. Using the above tables for dry measures in cooking will likely work just fine. Outside the US, dry ingredients are usually measured by weight. Use the table below to convert weights.

How Many Grams Are In a Teaspoon?

If you're looking for a grams-to-teaspoons conversion chart, you won't find one here. Grams are a measure of mass, and teaspoons measure volume. The correct conversion depends on the density of the item you're measuring. Water has a density of 1 g/ml, so the conversion is 1 gram to 1 millileter, which is equivalent to 0.2 teaspoons. For other substances, the density will be different, and each teaspoon will weigh a different number of grams.

What Language Are You Measuring?

Most countries use the metric system (officially known as the International System of Units), where every unit is defined using a measurable phenomenon, such as the distance light travels in a second. Some English-speaking countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, use measurement systems that originated from an old system called "English units". To add to the confusion, these systems all use the same names, such as pints and quarts, to mean slightly different measurement amounts. Even within the US, there are differences between the US contemporary system and that used by the US Food and Drug Administration. These differences are small when the amounts are small, but can really add up for larger volumes. For example, a US contemporary teaspoon is 4.93 ml compared to 5 ml in the Britisth Imperial System teaspoon. The difference in a teaspoon of vanilla would be hard to measure even if you tried. But that difference becomes much more noticeable when you consider a gallon of milk, which in the US is 3,785 ml versus 4,546 ml in Britain. That's over 3 US cups more milk when you pay in pounds instead of dollars! So pay close attention to the origin of the recipe you're using, since the author may be speaking a different language of measurement.

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Cooking Equivalents and Measures - Science of Food

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From cups to grams to eggs, in cooking and in science, numbers need units to be measurements. Different countries use different volume and mass measurements, and converting between them when you're up to your elbows in a recipe can be a challenge-but we're here to help.

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A dye is a colored substance that chemically bonds to the substrate to which it is being applied. This distinguishes dyes from pigments which do not chemically bind to the material they color. Dye is generally applied in an aqueous solution, and may require a mordant to improve the fastness of the dye on the fiber.

Both dyes and pigments are colored, because they absorb only some wavelengths of visible light. Dyes are usually soluble in water whereas pigments are insoluble. Some dyes can be rendered insoluble with the addition of salt to produce a lake pigment.

The majority of natural dyes are derived from non-animal sources: roots, berries, bark, leaves, wood, fungi and lichens. In the 21st century, most dyes are synthetic, i.e., are man-made from petrochemicals.[citation needed ] The process was pioneered by J. Pullar and Sons in Scotland. Other than pigmentation, they have a range of applications including organic dye lasers, optical media ( CD-R) and camera sensors ( color filter array).

Textile dyeing dates back to the Neolithic period. Throughout history, people have dyed their textiles using common, locally available materials. Scarce dyestuffs that produced brilliant and permanent colors such as the natural invertebrate dyes Tyrian purple and crimson kermes were highly prized luxury items in the ancient and medieval world. Plant-based dyes such as woad, indigo, saffron, and madder were important trade goods in the economies of Asia and Europe. Across Asia and Africa, patterned fabrics were produced using resist dyeing techniques to control the absorption of color in piece-dyed cloth. Dyes from the New World such as cochineal and logwood were brought to Europe by the Spanish treasure fleets, and the dyestuffs of Europe were carried by colonists to America.

Dyed flax fibers have been found in the Republic of Georgia in a prehistoric cave dated to 36,000 BP. Archaeological evidence shows that, particularly in India and Phoenicia, dyeing has been widely carried out for over 5,000 years. Early dyes were obtained from animal, vegetable or mineral sources, with no to very little processing. By far the greatest source of dyes has been from the plant kingdom, notably roots, berries, bark, leaves and wood, only few of which are used on a commercial scale.

The first synthetic dye, mauve, was discovered serendipitously by William Henry Perkin in 1856. The discovery of mauveine started a surge in synthetic dyes and in organic chemistry in general. Other aniline dyes followed, such as fuchsine, safranine, and induline. Many thousands of synthetic dyes have since been prepared.

The discovery of mauve also led to developments within immunology and chemotherapy. In 1863 the forerunner to Bayer AG was formed in what became Wuppertal, Germany. In 1891 Paul Ehrlich discovered that certain cells or organisms took up certain dyes selectively. He then reasoned that a sufficiently large dose could be injected to kill pathogenic microorganisms, if the dye did not affect other cells. Ehrlich went on to use a compound to target syphilis, the first time a chemical was used in order to selectively kill bacteria in the body, he also used methylene blue to target the plasmodium responsible for malaria.

The color of a dye is dependent upon the ability of the substance to absorb light within the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum (380-750 nm). An earlier theory known as Witt theory stated that a colored dye had two components, a chromophore which imparts color by absorbing light in the visible region (some examples are nitro, azo, quinoid groups) and an auxochrome which serves to deepen the color. This theory has been superseded by modern electronic structure theory which states that the color in dyes is due to excitation of valence π-electrons by visible light.

Dyes are classified according to their solubility and chemical properties.

are water- soluble anionic dyes that are applied to fibers such as silk, wool, nylon and modified acrylic fibers using neutral to acid dye baths. Attachment to the fiber is attributed, at least partly, to salt formation between anionic groups in the dyes and cationic groups in the fiber. Acid dyes are not substantive to cellulosic fibers. Most synthetic food colors fall in this category. Examples of acid dye are Alizarine Pure Blue B, Acid red 88, etc.

Basic dyes are water-soluble cationic dyes that are mainly applied to acrylic fibers, but find some use for wool and silk. Usually acetic acid is added to the dye bath to help the uptake of the dye onto the fiber. Basic dyes are also used in the coloration of paper.

Direct or substantive dyeing is normally carried out in a neutral or slightly alkaline dye bath, at or near boiling point, with the addition of either sodium chloride (NaCl) or sodium sulfate (Na ₂SO ₄) or sodium carbonate (Na ₂CO ₃). Direct dyes are used on cotton, paper, leather, wool, silk and nylon. They are also used as pH indicators and as biological stains.

Mordant dyes require a mordant, which improves the fastness of the dye against water, light and perspiration. The choice of mordant is very important as different mordants can change the final color significantly. Most natural dyes are mordant dyes and there is therefore a large literature base describing dyeing techniques. The most important mordant dyes are the synthetic mordant dyes, or chrome dyes, used for wool; these comprise some 30% of dyes used for wool, and are especially useful for black and navy shades. The mordant potassium dichromate is applied as an after-treatment. It is important to note that many mordants, particularly those in the heavy metal category, can be hazardous to health and extreme care must be taken in using them.

are essentially insoluble in water and incapable of dyeing fibres directly. However, reduction in alkaline liquor produces the water-soluble alkali metal salt of the dye. This form is often colorless, in which case it is referred to as a Leuco dye, and has an affinity for the textile fibre. Subsequent oxidation reforms the original insoluble dye. The color of denim is due to indigo, the original vat dye.

Reactive dyes utilize a chromophore attached to a substituent that is capable of directly reacting with the fiber substrate. The covalent bonds that attach reactive dye to natural fibers make them among the most permanent of dyes. "Cold" reactive dyes, such as Procion MX, Cibacron F, and Drimarene K, are very easy to use because the dye can be applied at room temperature. Reactive dyes are by far the best choice for dyeing cotton and other cellulose fibers at home or in the art studio.

Disperse dyes were originally developed for the dyeing of cellulose acetate, and are water-insoluble. The dyes are finely ground in the presence of a dispersing agent and sold as a paste, or spray-dried and sold as a powder. Their main use is to dye polyester, but they can also be used to dye nylon, cellulose triacetate, and acrylic fibers. In some cases, a dyeing temperature of 130 °C (266 °F) is required, and a pressurized dyebath is used. The very fine particle size gives a large surface area that aids dissolution to allow uptake by the fiber. The dyeing rate can be significantly influenced by the choice of dispersing agent used during the grinding.

Azoic dyeing is a technique in which an insoluble Azo dye is produced directly onto or within the fiber. This is achieved by treating a fiber with both diazoic and coupling components. With suitable adjustment of dyebath conditions the two components react to produce the required insoluble azo dye. This technique of dyeing is unique, in that the final color is controlled by the choice of the diazoic and coupling components. This method of dyeing cotton is declining in importance due to the toxic nature of the chemicals used.

Sulfur dyes are inexpensive dyes used to dye cotton with dark colors. Dyeing is effected by heating the fabric in a solution of an organic compound, typically a nitrophenol derivative, and sulfide or polysulfide. The organic compound reacts with the sulfide source to form dark colors that adhere to the fabric. Sulfur Black 1, the largest selling dye by volume, does not have a well defined chemical structure.

Some dyes commonly used in Staining:

One other class that describes the role of dyes, rather than their mode of use, is the food dye. Because food dyes are classed as food additives, they are manufactured to a higher standard than some industrial dyes. Food dyes can be direct, mordant and vat dyes, and their use is strictly controlled by legislation. Many are azo dyes, although anthraquinone and triphenylmethane compounds are used for colors such as green and blue. Some naturally occurring dyes are also used.[citation needed ]

A number of other classes have also been established, including:

Oxidation bases, for mainly hair and fur

Leather dyes, for leather

Fluorescent brighteners, for textile fibres and paper

Solvent dyes, for wood staining and producing colored lacquers, solvent inks, coloring oils, waxes.

Contrast dyes, injected for magnetic resonance imaging, are essentially the same as clothing dye except they are coupled to an agent that has strong paramagnetic properties.

Mayhems dye, used in water cooling for looks, often rebranded RIT dye

By the nature of their chromophore, dyes are divided into:

Dyes produced by the textile, printing and paper industries are a source of pollution of rivers and waterways. An estimated 700,000 tons of dyestuffs are produced annually (1990 data). The disposal of that material has received much attention, using chemical and biological means.

Classical dyes and their use in medicine and laboratory

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a dye or stain is one that is capable of penetrating living cells or tissues without causing immediate visible degenerative changes; thus, it is also referred to as a vital stain. Supravital staining entails the removal of living cells from an organism, whereas intravital staining entails the injection (or other administration) of the dye into the organism. The term "vital stain" is occasionally used interchangeably with an intravital stain and, in some instances, with a supravital stain, the underlying concept being that the cell being examined is still alive. In a stricter sense, the term "vital staining" means the polar opposite of "supravital staining." If living cells absorb the stain during supravital staining, they exclude it during "vital staining"; for example, they color negatively while only dead cells color positively, and thus viability can be determined by counting the percentage of total cells that stain negatively. Because the dye determines whether the staining is supravital or intravital, a combination of supravital and vital dyes can be used to more accurately classify cells into various groups (e.g., viable, dead, dying) .

1. ^ Steingruber, Elmar (2004). "Indigo and Indigo Colorants". Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH. doi:10.1002/14356007.a14_149.pub2. ISBN 3527306730.

2. ^ a Booth, Gerald (2000). "Dyes, General Survey". Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry. Wiley-VCH. doi:10.1002/14356007.a09_073. ISBN 3527306730. b

3. ^ John Pullar (1803-1878) - The Courier & Advertiser, 7 June 2016

4. ^ Balter, M (2009). "Clothes Make the (Hu) Man". Science. 325 (5946): 1329. doi:10.1126/science.325_1329a. PMID 19745126.

5. ^ Kvavadze, E; Bar-Yosef, O; Belfer-Cohen, A; et al. (2009). "30,000-Year-Old Wild Flax Fibers". Science. 325 (5946): 1359. Bibcode:2009Sci...325.1359K. doi:10.1126/science.1175404. PMID 19745144. S2CID 206520793. Supporting Online Material

6. ^ Hubner, K. (2006). "History - 150 Years of mauveine". Chemie in Unserer Zeit. 40 (4): 274-275. doi:10.1002/ciuz.200690054.

7. ^ Anthony S. Travis (1990). "Perkin's Mauve: Ancestor of the Organic Chemical Industry". Technology and Culture. 31 (1): 51-82. doi:10.2307/3105760. JSTOR 3105760.

8. ^ Hunger, K., ed. (2003). Industrial Dyes. Chemistry, Properties, Applications. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH.

9. ^ Zollinger, H. (2003). Color Chemistry. Synthesis, Properties and Applications of Organic Dyes and Pigments, 3rd ed. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH.

10. ^ Zollinger, Heinrich (2003). Syntheses, Properties, and Applications of Organic Dyes and Pigments. ISBN 9783906390239.

11. ^ Bafana, Amit; Devi, Sivanesan Saravana; Chakrabarti, Tapan (2011-09-28). "Azo dyes: past, present and the future". Environmental Reviews. 19 (NA): 350-371. doi:10.1139/a11-018. ISSN 1181-8700.

12. ^ Duarte, F. J.; Hillman, L. W., eds. (1990). Dye Laser Principles. Academic. New York.

13. ^ "patentstorm.us". Patentstorm.us. Archived from the original on 12 June 2011.

14. ^ Llewellyn, Bryan D. "Stainsfile - Dye index". Stainsfile.info. Archived from the original on 16 April 2008.

15. ^ Brindley, Lewis (July 2009). "New solution for dye wastewater pollution". Chemistry World.

16. ^ Xu, Xiang-Rong; Li, Hua-Bin; Wang, Wen-Hua; Gu, Ji-Dong (2004). "Degradation of dyes in aqueous solutions by the Fenton process". Chemosphere. 57 (7): 595-600. Bibcode:2004Chmsp..57..595X. doi:10.1016/j.chemosphere.2004.07.030. PMID 15488921.

17. ^ https://www.intechopen.com/online-first/78967 This article incorporates text available under the CC BY 3.0 license.

Abelshauser, Werner. German History and Global Enterprise: BASF: The History of a Company (2004) covers 1865 to 2000

Beer, John J. The Emergence of the German Dye Industry (1959)

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A dye is a colored substance that chemically bonds to the substrate to which it is being applied. This distinguishes dyes from pigments which do not chemically bind to the material they color. Dye is generally applied in an aqueous solution, and may require a mordant to improve the fastness of the dye on the fiber.

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica | View Edit History

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tannin | Definition, In Plants, Uses, & Facts

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Tannin, any of a group of phenolic compounds in woody flowering plants that are important deterrents to herbivores and that have a number of industrial applications. Tannins are used for tanning leather, dyeing fabrics, and making inks and have a variety of medical applications.

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Avec l'application Pl@ntNet, identifiez une plante à partir d'une photo, et rejoignez un projet de sciences participatives sur la biodiversité végétale

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Wild Pigment Project: Reciprocal Foraging Guidelines

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Wild Pigment Project: Reciprocal Foraging Guidelines

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WILD PIGMENT PROJECT EXTENDED HEALTH & SAFETY GUIDELINES: FORAGING SAFELY FOR WILD PIGMENTS

A common misconception is that mineral & botanical pigments are "non-toxic, because they're natural." Plants, stones and earths have properties that can be medicinal, neutral, toxic, or even deadly to humans, depending on context of use, degree of exposure, and cumulative practice. It's good to have this in mind when you approach a material that's new to you.

The precise elemental make-up of mineral pigments - earths, clays, and rocks - is quite difficult to identify for a number of reasons. Trained geologists can reasonably identify certain rocks by color, structure, and even smell or taste, but the elements present in earths and clays are much more difficult to assess, especially when they include environmental contaminants. Electron microscopy is the most reliable way to identify minerals. But since most of us don't have access to an electron microscope, it's best to assume that we don't know the specific nature of any given mineral.

Identifying plants and researching their levels of toxicity is easier than identifying minerals, though learning with someone who has experience and deep relationship with plants is much more effective, and safer, than trying to learn alone.

WORKING WITH MINERALS

Holding a rock in your hand is very different from pulverizing that same rock in a mortar and pestle, moving the dust around, and making paint. Picking up rocks with bare hands is generally considered safe as long as you are not in a contaminated area (more on contaminated areas to come).

Crushing rocks is quite different, however, as it produces dust. Fine dust can damage your health in the following ways:

1. Dust of any kind, even dust officially described as "non-toxic" can cause lung damage by blocking the tiny air sacks in your lungs. Consider "baker's lung," a form of asthma that affects bakers regularly exposed to flour dust, which of course isn't toxic. Over time, lung blockage will reduce your capacity to absorb oxygen and can lead to serious conditions, such as asthma or silicosis.

2. Dusts containing heavy metals can cause severe neurological damage, blindness, cancer and other illnesses. These dusts are absorbed through the lungs, but also, significantly, through the skin and eye membranes. See protocol outlined below for protecting from these toxins.

Non-toxic mineral dusts do not cause health damage when absorbed through the skin, and can even impart beneficial properties - thus the benefit of clay face masks, etc. However, since it's difficult to know whether mineral dusts contain toxins, exercise caution when exposing your skin. If you're in doubt, wear gloves and shower after exposure to mineral dusts.

Even when the plants or minerals you gather have low toxicity, if they're found in areas that have been made toxic by environmental contamination, then they will carry that contamination. If you choose to forage in contaminated sites, you must protect yourself accordingly- assume you're working with toxic materials.

AREAS OF CONTAMINATION

1. Mines. Mine dumps and tailing pits, while often abundant in pigment-rich ores, can be toxic sites that should be avoided unless accompanied by an experienced geologist. Iron oxides, which are considered non-toxic and are the product of various mining operations, can be contaminated by arsenic. Copper mines produce many dangerous toxins.

2. Roadsides in heavily-trafficked places. Gasoline fumes contain heavy metals which can settle out and accumulate on soils in road cuts. Use your judgement to assess risk - urban roads may have high levels of heavy metal fallout, while backcountry roads have much less.

3. Industrial-scale agricultural sites. Drainage ditches and soils can hold high levels of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that could be detrimental to health.

4. Any other place which has suffered environmental pollution from industry (like superfund sites) or individual household practices (improper storing of household toxins, etc).

5. Calciferous marine bodies. Sadly, due to ocean contaminants, the shells and bones of many ocean creatures contain dangerous levels of heavy metals like lead and mercury. When crushed, these dusts can be extremely toxic and dangerous, not only when inhaled, but also when absorbed through the skin. DO NOT USE. Egg shells may also be contaminated.

HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF

Avoid Exposure to Silicon Dust:

Silicon is the second most common element in the Earth's crust, after Oxygen. Silica, or silicon dioxide, is formed from silicon and oxygen atoms, and is the main component of sand (and glass!). It's also found in many rocks. When pulverized into fine dust and inhaled, silica can, over time, cause silicosis, the most common occupational lung disease in the world. Therefore, it's best to be careful to avoid lung exposure to fine silica dust. Ceramicists are generally familiar with this danger and take precautions to avoid inhaling dry clay dust.

1. Don't crush up hard rocks. A hard rock is likely to be a rock with a lot of silica. Look for soft earths or very crumbly rocks that require little effort to pulverize into pigment. Since silica is colorless, it lightens the color of the minerals it presents with, so hard rocks are likely to make very pale pigments. Think, "glass dust."

2. Avoid working with dry material, whenever possible, especially dried clays. Clays have very fine particles, and high levels of silica. Wet clay doesn't pose the same issue. Similarly, any fine pigment is safer to work with when wet. Instead of dry sifting your pigment, consider using a water-based sifting method, known as "levigation."

3. Protect your lungs from exposure. See "lung protection" below.
Wear eye protection: goggles that wrap around the eye on all sides. Fine dusts can enter the body through the delicate membranes of the eyes.

AVOID TOXIC OR CONTAMINATED MINERALS

Unless you have a pristine workspace and excellent dust-hygiene practices (see below), it's wise to avoid making pigment with toxic minerals altogether. If you work with pigments that have been prepared elsewhere, and contain toxins, your risk is of course lower, but be sure to protect your skin and lungs from exposure nevertheless.

If your exposure to mineral dusts is minimal - i.e., you don't use a mortar and pestle very much, and you have only occasional exposure to dry pigment - you may make the very personal decision not to reduce your lung and skin exposure to zero whenever you're around dry pigment.

TAKE CARE WHEN WORKING WITH WASTE STREAM METALS LIKE COPPER & IRON

Copper scraps make a beautiful blue or green pigment, called verdigris, when exposed to acids and salts. The compound is called cupric oxide. The process of transformation from metal to turquoise pigment moves the copper from an inert metal to a toxic coating or dust. This copper-based pigment is a poison that must be handled with care with, because eventually it will end up returning to the ecosystem. Before working with copper as a source of pigment, consider the legacy this pigment will leave behind. Read its toxicity profile, and make sure you know what you will do with all the material you produce.

Iron can also be toxic. If dissolving iron scraps in acid to produce iron oxide, or rust, ventilate well and do not heat. Read this.

LUNG PROTECTION

1. Wear a well-fitted mask that filters fine dusts, ideally a respirator with changeable filters.

2. Keep your mask on until your space is clean and you've removed and stored your dusty clothes.

SKIN PROTECTION

1. Cover your skin. This means not only wearing gloves, but also head-to-toe protection, including a head covering, shoes, and eye protection.

2. Wear "dedicated clothing." Take off your protective clothing when you're finished working with the dust, and wash separately from your regular laundry.

3. Never eat, drink or smoke when working with toxic dust.

4. Shower immediately if your skin or hair are exposed to dust.

KEEP YOUR WORKSPACE CLEAN

There's no sense in wearing a mask and covering your skin while crushing rocks into pigment if you take your gloves and mask off as soon as you've finished grinding, touch all the dusty surfaces around you, and send billows of dust into the air from your clothing.

When you're finished working, carefully wipe down all the surfaces in your workspace and remove & store dusty clothes.

TEND THE AIR

Do not use a household air purifier. These will circulate the air and disturb the dust. If possible, work outside. If you think you'll be doing a lot of work with dry pigments indoors over time, invest in a high-quality studio air filter with a flexible vent that can be focused right over your work spot.

A NOTE ON LEGAL SAFETY

Protect yourself: don't get arrested for taking rock, clay, earth or sand where it's not legal to do so. In the United States, it's illegal to take anything from National Parks. In Europe and other parts of the world, there are many sites that are protected by local bylaws or are designated Sites of Specific Scientific Interest. Many countries also have laws in place to protect sites of cultural heritage. If you're traveling in areas like these, be aware that your bag may be screened at the airport, and that arrests for transporting material from protected sites are not uncommon.

PERSONAL PRACTICE & SAFETY

At this point, you're probably thinking, "Do I have to follow this safety protocol whenever I crush a rock or open a vial of dry pigment?!" If your exposure to mineral dusts is minimal - i.e., you don't use a mortar and pestle very much, and you have only occasional exposure to dry pigment - you may make the very personal decision not to reduce your lung and skin exposure to zero whenever you're around pigment dust. You may even decide not to wear a mask or gloves. Many of the danger associated with pigment use are the result of prolonged, not brief and occasional exposure. However, there are exceptions to this - pigments that can cause you harm after relatively little exposure. The message here is: do your own research. Don't put your health in the hands of anyone but yourself.

Feeling overwhelmed? Here's a brief summary:

1. Do your own research. Don't take any one person's word for what's safe pigment practice.

2. Forage in places without a history of environmental contamination. Avoid mines, agricultural areas, and urban roadsides.

3. If you're unsure about the environment, wear gloves when picking up rocks or scooping soil.

4. Crush rocks that crumble easily. Avoid hard, glassy rocks. Avoid working with dry clays.

5. Cover your skin and hair, and wear a respirator or dust mask when grinding toxic or silica-rich minerals into fine particles, especially if you do so frequently.

6. Work outside, and/or work near a dust-specific air filter that can target your work spot.

7. Clean up carefully when you're done to remove all dust.

8. Shower after exposure and wash your (dedicated!) work clothes regularly.

9. Never eat, smoke, or drink while working, and never use your pigment tools in the kitchen!

LEGAL SAFETY

Protect yourself: don't get arrested for taking rock, clay, earth or sand where it's not legal to do so. In the United States, it's illegal to take anything from National Parks. In Europe and other parts of the world, there are many sites that are protected by local bylaws or are designated Sites of Specific Scientific Interest. Many countries also have laws in place to protect sites of cultural heritage. If you're traveling in areas like these, be aware that your bag may be screened at the airport, and that arrests for transporting material from protected sites are not uncommon.

~ Extended health & Safety Guidelines written by Tilke Elkins in February 2021, revised and updated in October 2023. Much thanks to the many people who have helped inform these guidelines, and especially to Dr. Ruth Siddall, a geologist who uses Earth science to analyze and identify pigments, for her extensive advice and recommendations for these guidelines.

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reciprocal foraging - WILD PIGMENT PROJECT

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A common misconception is that mineral & botanical pigments are "non-toxic, because they're natural." Plants, stones and earths have properties that can be medicinal, neutral, toxic, or even deadly to humans, depending on context of use, degree of exposure, and cumulative practice. It's good to have this in mind when you approach a material that's new to you.

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On Being: "The Intelligence of Plants" interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer

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On Being: "The Intelligence of Plants" interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer

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Krista Tippett, host: "Why is the world so beautiful?" This is a question Robin Wall Kimmerer pursues as a botanist and also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She's the author of the beloved book Braiding Sweetgrass. She's written, "Science polishes the gift of seeing, indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language." An expert in moss - a bryologist - she describes mosses as the "coral reefs of the forest." She opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life we are used to naming and imagining as inanimate.

Robin Wall Kimmerer: I can't think of a single scientific study in the last few decades that has demonstrated that plants or animals are dumber than we think. It's always the opposite, right? What we're revealing is the fact that they have a capacity to learn, to have memory, and we're at the edge of a wonderful revolution in really understanding the sentience of other beings.

[ music: "Seven League Boots" by Zoe Keating]

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

Tippett: Robin Wall Kimmerer is a professor of environmental biology at the State University of New York and the founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She works with tribal nations on environmental problem-solving and sustainability. And part of that work is about recovering lineages of knowledge that were made illegal in the policies of tribal assimilation which did not fully end in the U.S. until the 1970s. Robin Wall Kimmerer's grandfather attended one of the now infamous boarding schools designed to "civilize" Indian youth; and she only began to learn the Anishinaabe language of her people as an adult. We spoke in 2015.

Tippett: I'm just so intrigued when I look at the way you introduce yourself. It will often include that you from the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, from the bear clan, adopted into the eagles. I'd love for you to just take us a little bit into that world you're describing that you came from, and ask, also, the question I always ask: what was the spiritual and religious background of that world you grew up in of your childhood?

Kimmerer: I'd like to start with the second part of that question. I was lucky enough to grow up in the fields and the woods of upstate New York. I was lucky in that regard, but disappointed also, in that I grew up away from the Potawatomi people, away from all of our people by virtue of history, the history of removal and the taking of children to the Indian boarding schools. And so, in a sense, the questions that I had about who I was in the world, what the world was like, those are questions that I really wished I'd had a cultural elder to ask, but I didn't, but I had the woods to ask. And there's a way in which just growing up in the woods and the fields, they really became my doorway into culture. In the absence of human elders, I had plant elders instead.

Tippett: And it sounds like you did not grow up speaking the language of the Potawatomi nation, which is Anishinaabe, is that right?

Kimmerer: That's right. Yeah, the language is called Anishinaabemowin. And the Potawatomi language is very close to that.

Tippett: I was intrigued to see that mention somewhere in your writing that you take part in a Potawatomi language lunchtime class that actually happens in Oklahoma, and you're there via the internet, because I grew up, actually, in Potawatomi County in Oklahoma. And having told you that, I never knew or learned anything about what that word meant, much less the people and the culture it described.

Kimmerer: That is so interesting to live in a place that is named that. This is the ways in which cultures become invisible and the language becomes invisible. And through history and the reclaiming of that, the making culture visible again, to speak the language in even the tiniest amount so that it's almost as if it feels like the air is waiting to hear this language that had been lost for so long. So it delights me that I can be learning an ancient language by completely modern technologies. Sitting at my office, eating lunch, learning Potawatomi grammar.

Tippett: So when you said a minute ago that you spent your childhood, and actually the searching questions of your childhood somehow found expression, and the closest that you came to answers, in the woods. And it seems to me that that's such a wonderful way to fill out something else you've said before, which is that you were born a botanist, which is a way to say this, which was the language you got as you entered college at forestry school at State University of New York.

Kimmerer: Yes. There was no question but that I'd study botany in college. It was my passion. Still is, of course. But the botany that I encountered there was so different than the way that I understood plants. Plants were reduced to object. What was supposedly important about them was the mechanism by which they worked, not what their gifts were, not what their capacities were. They were really thought of as objects, whereas I thought of them as subjects. And that shift in worldview was a big hurdle for me in entering the field of science.

Tippett: One way you've said it is that that science was asking different questions, and you had other questions, other language, and other protocol that came from indigenous culture. There's one place in your writing where you're talking about beauty. You're talking about a question you would have, which is why two flowers are beautiful together. And that that question, for example, would violate the division that is necessary for objectivity. But then, you do this wonderful thing where you actually give a scientific analysis of the statement that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which would be one of the critiques of a question like that, that it's not really asking a question that is rational or scientific. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Kimmerer: I do. I do exactly.

Tippett: Flesh that out, because that's such an interesting juxtaposition of how you actually started to both experience the dissonance between those kinds of questionings and also start to weave them together.

Kimmerer: Yes, it goes back to the story of when I very proudly entered the forestry school as an 18-year-old and telling them that the reason that I wanted to study botany was because I wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. These are these amazing displays of this bright, chrome yellow and deep purple of New England aster, and they look stunning together. And the two plants so often intermingle rather than living apart from one another, and I wanted to know why that was. I thought that surely in the order and the harmony of the universe, there would be an explanation for why they looked so beautiful together. And I was told that that was not science, that if I was interested in beauty, I should go to art school.

Which was really demoralizing as a freshman, but I came to understand that question wasn't going to be answered by science, that science, as a way of knowing, explicitly sets aside our emotions, our aesthetic reactions to things. We have to analyze them as if they were just pure material, and not matter and spirit together. And, yes, as it turns out, there's a very good biophysical explanation for why those plants grow together, so it's a matter of aesthetics and it's a matter of ecology. Those complimentary colors of purple and gold together, being opposites on the color wheel, they're so vivid, they actually attract far more pollinators than if those two grew apart from one another.

So each of those plants benefits by combining its beauty with the beauty of the other. And that's a question that science can address, certainly, as well as artists. And I just think that "Why is the world so beautiful?" is a question that we all ought to be embracing.

Tippett: Now, you did work, for a time, at Bausch & Lomb after college. You went into a more traditional scientific endeavor. I wonder, was there a turning point, a day or a moment where you felt compelled to bring these things together in the way you could, these different ways of knowing and seeing and studying the world?

Kimmerer: Yes. I think the place that it became most important to me to start to bring these ways of knowing back together again is when, as a young Ph.D. botanist, I was invited to a gathering of traditional plant knowledge holders. And I was just there to listen, and it was such an amazing experience. Four days of listening to people whose knowledge of the plant world was so much deeper than my own.

Tippett: And were these elders? Were these indigenous teachers?

Kimmerer: They were. Their education was on the land and with the plants and through the oral tradition. But I just sat there and soaked in this wonderful conversation, which interwove mythic knowledge and scientific knowledge into this beautiful cultural, natural history. And, for me, it was absolutely a watershed moment, because it made me remember those things that starting to walk the science path had made me forget, or attempted to make me forget. And I just saw that their knowledge was so much more whole and rich and nurturing that I wanted to do everything that I could to bring those ways of knowing back into harmony.

Tippett: You said at one point that you had gotten to the point where - you were talking about the names of plants. "I was teaching the names and ignoring the songs." What do you mean by that?

Kimmerer: One of the difficulties of moving in the scientific world is that when we name something, often with a scientific name, this name becomes almost an end to inquiry. We sort of say, well, we know it now. We're able to systematize it and put a Latin binomial on it, so it's ours. We know what we need to know. But that is only in looking, of course, at the morphology of the organism, at the way that it looks. It ignores all of its relationships. It's such a mechanical, wooden representation of what a plant really is. And we reduce them tremendously if we just think about them as physical elements of the ecosystem.

[ music: "All Things Transient" by Maybeshewill]

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today I'm with botanist and nature writer Robin Wall Kimmerer. She writes books that join new scientific and ancient indigenous knowledge, including Gathering Moss and Braiding Sweetgrass.

Tippett: So this notion of the earth's animacy, of the animacy of the natural world and everything in it, including plants, is very pivotal to your thinking, and to the way you explore the natural world, even scientifically, and draw conclusions, also, about our relationship to the natural world. So I really want to delve into that some more. You said that there's a grammar of animacy. Talk about that a little bit.

Kimmerer: Yes. This comes back to what I think of as the innocent or childlike way of knowing. Actually, that's a terrible thing to call it. We say it's an innocent way of knowing, and, in fact, it's a very worldly and wise way of knowing. That kind of deep attention that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim, because attention is that doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity. And it worries me greatly that today's children can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than ten plants. That means they're not paying attention.

In the English language, if we want to speak of that sugar maple or that salamander, the only grammar that we have to do so is to call those beings an "it." And if I called my grandmother or the person sitting across the room from me an "it," that would be so rude, right? And we wouldn't tolerate that for members of our own species, but we not only tolerate it, but it's the only way we have in the English language to speak of other beings, is as "it." In Potawatomi, the cases that we have are animate and inanimate, and it is impossible in our language to speak of other living beings as "it"s.

Tippett: So living beings would all be animate, all living beings, anything that was alive in the Potawatomi language.

Kimmerer: Yes. Absolutely.

Tippett: And inanimate would be, what, materials or...?

Kimmerer: You raise a very good question, because the way that, again, Western science would give the criteria for what does it mean to be alive is a little different than what you might find in traditional culture, where we think of water as alive, as rocks as alive. Alive in different ways, but certainly not inanimate. Generally, the inanimate grammar is reserved for those things which humans have created.

Tippett: OK. Like the table, something like that?

Kimmerer: Yes, exactly. Right, yes.

Tippett: And I have to say - I'm sure you know this, because I'm sure you get this reaction a lot, especially in scientific circles - it's unfamiliar and slightly uncomfortable in Western ears to hear someone refer to plants as persons. It's unfamiliar. Does that happen a lot? Is that kind of a common reaction?

Kimmerer: Sure, sure. Scientists are very eager to say that we oughtn't to personify elements in nature for fear of anthropomorphizing. And what I mean when I talk about the personhood of all beings, plants included, is not that I am attributing human characteristics to them, not at all. I'm attributing plant characteristics to plants. Just as it would be disrespectful to try and put plants in the same category through the lens of anthropomorphism, I think it's also deeply disrespectful to say that they have no consciousness, no awareness, no being-ness at all. And this denial of personhood to all other beings is increasingly being refuted by science itself.

Tippett: That's interesting.

Kimmerer: Yeah. I can't think of a single scientific study in the last few decades that has demonstrated that plants or animals are dumber than we think. It's always the opposite, right? What we're revealing is the fact that they have extraordinary capacities, which are so unlike our own, but we dismiss them because, well, if they don't do it like animals do it, then they must not be doing anything, when, in fact, they're sensing their environment, responding to their environment in incredibly sophisticated ways. The science which is showing that plants have capacity to learn, to have memory, we're at the edge of a wonderful revolution in really understanding the sentience of other beings.

Tippett: Yeah. Here's something beautiful that you wrote in your book Gathering Moss, just as an example. "The rocks are beyond slow, beyond strong, and yet, yielding to a soft, green breath as powerful as a glacier, the mosses wearing away their surfaces grain by grain, bringing them slowly back to sand. There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents." That's so beautiful and so amazing to think about, to just read those sentences and think about that conversation, as you say.

Kimmerer: Yes. And it's a conversation that takes place at a pace that we humans, especially we contemporary humans who are rushing about, we can't even grasp the pace at which that conversation takes place. So thinking about plants as persons, indeed, thinking about rocks as persons, forces us to shed our idea of the only pace that we live in is the human pace. It's, I think, very, very exciting to think about these ways of being which happen on completely different scales, and so exciting to think about what we might learn from them.

Tippett: You make such an interesting observation that the way you walk through the world and immerse yourself in moss and plant life - you've said you become aware that we have some deficits compared to our companion species. I sense that photosynthesis, that we can't even photosynthesize, that this is a quality you covet in our botanical brothers and sisters. [laughs]

Kimmerer: [ laughs] It's true.

Tippett: Take me inside that, because I want to understand that.

Kimmerer: I do. I have photosynthesis envy. The ability to take these non-living elements of the world, air and light and water, and turn them into food that can then be shared with the whole rest of the world - to turn them into medicine that is medicine for people and for trees and for soil, and we cannot even approach the kind of creativity that they have.

Tippett: One thing you say that I'd like to understand better is, "Science polishes the gift of seeing, indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language." So I'd love an example of something - what are the gifts of seeing that science offers, and then the gifts of listening and language, and how all of that gives you this rounded understanding of something?

Kimmerer: What I mean when I say that "science polishes the gift of seeing" brings us to an intense kind of attention that science allows us to bring to the natural world, and that kind of attention also includes ways of seeing, quite literally, through other lenses - that we might have the hand lens, the magnifying glass in our hands that allows us to look at that moss with an acuity that the human eye doesn't have so we see more. The microscope that lets us see the gorgeous architecture by which it's put together, the scientific instrumentation in the laboratory that would allow us to look at the miraculous way that water interacts with cellulose, let's say. That's what I mean by "science polishes our ability to see" - it extends our eyes into other realms. But we're, in many cases, looking at the surface. And by the surface, I mean the material being alone.

But in indigenous ways of knowing, we say that we know a thing when we know it not only with our physical senses, with our intellect, but also when we engage our intuitive ways of knowing, of emotional knowledge and spiritual knowledge. And that's really what I mean by listening. By seeing that traditional knowledge engages us in listening. And what is the story that that being might share with us if we know how to listen as well as we know how to see?

[ music: "Causeway" by Ryan Teague]

Tippett: After a short break, more with Robin Wall Kimmerer. You can always listen again, and hear the unedited version of every show we do on the On Being podcast feed - wherever podcasts are found.

[ music: "Causeway" by Ryan Teague]

I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today I'm with botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer. She's a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and she joins scientific and indigenous ways of seeing in her research and in her writing for a broad audience. We're exploring her sense of the intelligence in life we are used to seeing as inanimate. She says that as our knowledge of plant life unfolds, human vocabulary and imaginations must adapt.

Tippett: Let's talk some more about mosses, because you did write this beautiful book about it, and you are a bryologist. And so that's a specialty, even within plant biology.

Kimmerer: Within botany.

Tippett: And also I learned that your work with moss inspired Elizabeth Gilbert's novel The Signature Of All Things, which is about a botanist. I learned so many things from that book. It's also that I had never thought very deeply about moss, but that moss inhabits nearly every ecosystem on earth, over 22,000 species, that mosses have the ability to clone themselves from broken off leaves or torn fragments, that they're integral to the functioning of a forest. I mean, just describe some of the things you've heard and understood from moss.

Kimmerer: Thank you for asking that question, because it really gets to this idea of how science asks us to learn about organisms. Traditional knowledge asks us to learn from them. And when I think about mosses, in particular, as the most ancient of land plants, they have been here for a very long time. They've figured out a lot about how to live well on the earth, and, for me, I think they're really good storytellers in the way that they live. An example of what I mean by this is in their simplicity, in the power of being small; mosses become so successful all over the world because they live in these tiny little layers on rocks, on logs, and on trees. They work with the natural forces that lie over every little surface of the world, and to me, they are exemplars of not only surviving, but flourishing by working with natural processes. Mosses are superb teachers about living within your means.

Tippett: And you say they take possession of spaces that are too small - other plants are excluded from those spaces, but they thrive there.

Kimmerer: That's right. Mosses have, in the ecological sense, very low competitive ability, because they're small, because they don't grab resources very efficiently, and so this means that they have to live in the interstices. They have to live in places where the dominant competitive plants can't live. But the way that they do this really brings into question the whole premise that competition is what really structures biological evolution and biological success. Because mosses are not good competitors at all, and yet they are the oldest plants on the planet. They have persisted here for 350 million years. They ought to be doing something right here. And one of those somethings, I think, has to do with their ability to cooperate with one another, to share the limited resources that they have, to really give more than they take. Mosses build soil, they purify water, they are like the coral reefs of the forest, they make homes for this myriad of all these very cool little invertebrates who live in there. They are just engines of biodiversity. They do all of these things, and yet, they're only a centimeter tall.

Tippett: [ laughs] Right. Another point that is implied in how you talk about us acknowledging the animacy of plants is that whenever we use the language of "it," whatever we're talking about - well, let's say this. We don't call anything we love and want to protect and would work to protect "it." That language distances us.

Kimmerer: It certainly does. And the language of "it," which distances, disrespects, and objectifies, I can't help but think is at the root of a worldview that allows us to exploit nature. And by exploit, I mean in a way that really seriously degrades the land and the waters, because, in fact, we have to consume. We have to take. We are animals, right? But that, to me, is different than really rampant exploitation. But this is why I've been thinking a lot about: Are there ways to bring this notion of animacy into the English language? Because so many of us that I've talked to about this feel really deeply uncomfortable calling the living world "it," and yet, we don't have an alternative, other than "he" or "she." And I've been thinking about the inspiration that the Anishinaabe language offers in this way and contemplating new pronouns.

Tippett: You've been playing with one or two, haven't you?

Kimmerer: I have. I've been thinking about the word "aki" in our language, which refers to land. And there's a beautiful word - "bimaadiziaki," which one of my elders kindly shared with me. It means "a living being of the earth." But could we be inspired by that little sound at the end of that word, the "ki"? And use "ki" as a pronoun, a respectful pronoun inspired by this language as an alternative to "he," "she," or "it," so that when I'm tapping my maples in the springtime, I can say, "We're going to go hang the bucket on ki. Ki is giving us maple syrup this springtime." This, then, of course, acknowledges the being-ness of that tree, and we don't reduce it to an object. It feels so wrong to say that.

And I have some reservations about using a word inspired from the Anishinaabe language, because I don't, in any way, want to engage in cultural appropriation. But this word, this sound, "ki," is, of course, also the word for "who" in Spanish and in French. It turns out that, of course, it's an alternate pronunciation for "chi," for life force, for life energy. I'm finding lots of examples that people are bringing to me where this word also means a living being of the earth.

Tippett: That's really interesting.

Kimmerer: The plural pronoun that I think is perhaps even more powerful is not one that we need to be inspired by another language, because we already have it in English, and that is the word "kin."

Tippett: That's the plural of "ki"?

Kimmerer: Yes, "kin" is the plural of "ki." So that when the geese fly overhead, we can say, "Kin are flying south for the winter. Come back soon." So that every time we speak of the living world, we can embody our relatedness to them.

Tippett: Sustainability is some language we use about the world we're living into or need to live into. And I sense from your writing and especially from your indigenous tradition that sustainability really is not big enough, and that it might even be a cop-out. You didn't use that language, but you're actually talking about a much more generous and expansive vision of relatedness between humans and the natural worlds and what we want to create.

Kimmerer: I am. I agree with you that the language of sustainability is pretty limited. If something is going to be sustainable, its ability to provide for us will not be compromised into the future. And that's all a good thing. But at its heart, sustainability, the way we think about it, is embedded in this worldview that we, as human beings, have some ownership over these, what we call, resources, and that we want the world to be able to continue to keep - that human beings can keep taking and keep consuming.

The notion of reciprocity is really different from that. It's an expansion from that, because what it says is that our role as human people is not just to take from the earth, and the role of the earth is not just to provide for our single species. So reciprocity actually kind of broadens this notion to say that not only does the earth sustain us, but that we have the capacity and the responsibility to sustain her in return. So it broadens the notion of what it is to be a human person, not just a consumer. And there's such joy in being able to do that, to have it be a mutual flourishing instead of the more narrow definition of sustainability so that we can just keep on taking.

Tippett: I keep thinking, as I'm reading you and now as I'm listening to you - a conversation I've had across the years with Christians who are going back to the Bible and seeing how certain translations and readings and interpretations, especially of that language of Genesis about human beings being blessed to have dominion - what is it - "to have dominion and subdue the earth," was read in a certain way and a certain period of time by human beings, by industrialists and colonizers and even missionaries, so there is language, and there's a mentality about taking that actually seemed to have kind of a religious blessing on it. And now people are reading those same texts differently. Do you ever have those conversations with people? Because the tradition you come from would never, ever have read the text that way. So culturally, we are incrementally moving more towards the worldview that you come from.

Kimmerer: I think that that's true, and I think that that longing and the materiality of the need for redefining our relationship with place is being taught to us by the land, isn't it? We've seen that, in a way, we've been captured by a worldview of dominion that does not serve our species well in the long term, and, moreover, it doesn't serve all the other beings in creation well at all.

So we are attempting a mid-course correction here. And I think that it's really important to recognize, that for most of human history, I think the evidence suggests that we have lived well and in balance with the living world. And it's, to my way of thinking, almost an eyeblink of time in human history that we have had a truly adversarial relationship with nature.

Tippett: It seems to me that this view that you have of the natural world and our place in it, it's a way to think about biodiversity and us as part of that, but reciprocity, again, takes that a step farther, right?

Kimmerer: Yes. The idea of reciprocity, of recognizing that we humans do have gifts that we can give in return for all that has been given to us is, I think, a really generative and creative way to be a human in the world. Some of our oldest teachings are saying, what does it mean to be an educated person? It means that you know what your gift is and how to give it on behalf of the land and of the people, just like every single species has its own gift. And if one of those species and the gifts that it carries is missing in biodiversity, the ecosystem is depauperate, the ecosystem is too simple. It doesn't work as well when that gift is missing.

Tippett: Here's something you wrote. You talked about goldenrods and asters a minute ago, and you said, "When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response."

Kimmerer: Yes. And I think of my writing very tangibly as my way of entering into reciprocity with the living world. It's that which I can give and it comes from my years as a scientist, of deep paying attention to the living world, and not only to their names, but to their songs. And having heard those songs, I feel a deep responsibility to share them, and to see if, in some way, stories could help people fall in love with the world again.

[ music: "Bowen" by Goldmund]

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today I'm with botanist and nature writer Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Tippett: You remain a professor of environmental biology at SUNY, and you have also created the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. So that's also a gift you're bringing. You're bringing these disciplines into conversation with each other. I wonder, what is happening in that conversation? How is that working, and are there things happening that surprise you?

Kimmerer: Yes. What we're trying to do at the Center For Native Peoples and the Environment is to bring together the tools of Western science, but to employ them, or maybe deploy them, in the context of some of the indigenous philosophy and ethical frameworks about our relationship to the earth. One of the things that I would especially like to highlight about that is I really think of our work as, in a sense, trying to indigenize science education within the academy. Because as a young person, as a student entering into that world, and understanding that the indigenous ways of knowing, these organic ways of knowing, are really absent from academia, I think that we can train better scientists, train better environmental professionals when there's a plurality of these ways of knowing, when indigenous knowledge is present in the discussion.

We have created a new minor in indigenous peoples and the environment, so that when our students leave and when our students graduate, they have an awareness of other ways of knowing, they have this glimpse into a worldview which is really different from the scientific worldview. I think of them as just being stronger and have this ability for what has been called "two-eyed seeing," seeing the world through both of these lenses, and in that way, have a bigger toolset for environmental problem-solving.

So much of what we do as environmental scientists - if we take a strictly scientific approach, we have to exclude values and ethics, right? Because those are not part of the scientific method. There's good reason for that, and much of the power of the scientific method comes from the rationality and the objectivity. But a lot of the problems that we face in terms of sustainability and environment lie at the juncture of nature and culture. So we can't just rely on a single way of knowing that explicitly excludes values and ethics. That's not going to move us forward.

Tippett: I know this is a fairly new program, but I wonder, are you seeing results that are interesting about how people are applying this, or where they are taking it?

Kimmerer: Well, it's too early to see it, I think, in those scientific and professional metrics, if you will. But what I see is that the students who have become acquainted with these ways of knowing are the natural disseminators of these ideas. They tell me that when they are taking their other classes in conservation biology or wildlife ecology or fisheries, they now feel like they have the vocabulary and the perspective to speak up and say, well, when we're designing this salmon management plan, what is the input of native peoples? How will their traditional knowledge help us do better fisheries management? The invisible knowledge of traditional knowledge has become visible and has become part of the discourse.

Tippett: In your book Braiding Sweetgrass, there's this line: "It came to me while picking beans, the secret of happiness." [laughs] And you talk about gardening, which is actually something that many people do, and I think more people are doing. So that's a very concrete way of illustrating this.

Kimmerer: It is. In talking with my environment students, they wholeheartedly agree that they love the earth. But when I ask them the question of "Does the earth love you back?" there's a great deal of hesitation and reluctance and eyes cast down, like, oh, gosh, I don't know. Are we even allowed to talk about that? That would mean that the earth had agency and that I was not an anonymous little blip on the landscape, that I was known by my home place.

So it's a very challenging notion, but I bring it to the garden and think about the way that when we, as human people, demonstrate our love for one another, it is in ways that I find very much analogous to the way that the earth takes care of us, is when we love somebody, we put their wellbeing at the top of a list and we want to feed them well. We want to nurture them. We want to teach them. We want to bring beauty into their lives. We want to make them comfortable and safe and healthy. That's how I demonstrate love, in part, to my family, and that's just what I feel in the garden [laughs], as the earth loves us back in beans and corn and strawberries. Food could taste bad. It could be bland and boring, but it isn't. There are these wonderful gifts that the plant beings, to my mind, have shared with us. And it's a really liberating idea to think that the earth could love us back, but it also opens the notion of reciprocity that with that love and regard from the earth comes a real deep responsibility.

Tippett: Yeah. What is it you say? "The large framework of that is the renewal of the world for the privilege of breath." I think that's right on the edge.

Kimmerer: Yes.

Tippett: I'm thinking of how, for all the public debates we have about our relationship with the natural world, and whether it's climate change or not, or man-made, there's also the reality that very few people living anywhere don't have some experience of the natural world changing in ways that they often don't recognize. And in all kinds of places with all kinds of political cultures, where I see people just getting together and doing the work that needs to be done, and becoming stewards, however they justify that or wherever they fit into the public debates or not, a kind of common denominator is that they have discovered a love for the place they come from. That that they share. And they may have these same kinds of political differences that are out there, but there's this love of place, and that creates a different world of action. Are there communities you think of when you think of this kind of communal love of place where you see new models happening?

Kimmerer: There are many, many examples. I think so many of them are rooted in the food movement. I think that's really exciting because there is a place where reciprocity between people and the land is expressed in food, and who doesn't want that? It's good for people. It's good for land. So I think movements from tree planting to community gardens, farm-to-school, local, organic - all of these things are just at the right scale, because the benefits come directly into you and to your family, and the benefits of your relationships to land are manifest right in your community, right in your patch of soil and what you're putting on your plate. Just as the land shares food with us, we share food with each other and then contribute to the flourishing of that place that feeds us.

Tippett: I want to read something from Braiding Sweetgrass. You wrote, "We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity. Plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Our elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift we must pass on just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we'll need will be for mourning, for the passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers, and the memory of snow."

That's one of the hard places this world you straddle brings you to. But, again, all these things you live with and learn, how do they start to shift the way you think about what it means to be human?

Kimmerer: The passage that you just read, and all of the experience, I suppose, that flows into that has, as I've gotten older, brought me to a really acute sense, not only of the beauty of the world, but the grief that we feel for it, for her, for ki. That we can't have an awareness of the beauty of the world without also a tremendous awareness of the wounds. That we see the old growth forest and we also see the clear cut. We see the beautiful mountain and we see it torn open for mountaintop removal. So one of the things that I continue to learn about and need to learn more about is the transformation of love to grief to even stronger love and the interplay of love and grief that we feel for the world. And how to harness the power of those related impulses is something that I have had to learn.

[ music: "If I'd Have Known It Was the Last (Second Position)" by Codes in the Cloud s]

Tippett: Robin Wall Kimmerer is the State University of New York Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. And she's founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Her books include Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses and Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.

[ music: "If I'd Have Known It Was the Last (Second Position)" by Codes in the Cloud s]

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Robin Wall Kimmerer - The Intelligence of Plants | The On Being Project

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Krista Tippett, host: "Why is the world so beautiful?" This is a question Robin Wall Kimmerer pursues as a botanist and also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She's the author of the beloved book Braiding Sweetgrass. She's written, "Science polishes the gift of seeing, indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language."