TATAKI-ZOMÉ WORKSHOP

Yesterday I gave two short circular textile printing workshops at the DWGWD festival, a Dutch sustainability festival for everyone who wants to take action to reduce climate change. The festival took place at BlueCity, the circular hub in Rotterdam. In this workshop - which I hosted together with my Living Colour partner-in-design Ilfa Siebenhaar - we taught participants how to dye and print fabrics and paper with natural pigments from waste streams.

TATAKI-ZOMÉ FROM WASTE STREAMS

Tataki-Zomé (たたき染め) is a traditonal Japanese method of transferring leaves and flowers onto fabric or paper. It is a form of nature printing, but instead of using inks or paints, tataki-zomé uses the colours of the plant itself. In English this technique is often called "flower pounding".

First the flowers or flower petals, leaves and stems are arranged on top of the surface that is going to be printed, either fabric or (watercolour)paper. Next the flowers are covered by a paper towel or wax paper. Then the flowers and leaves are hammered, so the juices and colours are pressed into the surface. It's also possible to create a mirrored pattern by folding the paper or fabric over the flowers, instead of covering them with a paper towel. This creates beautiful imprints of the colours and shapes. Depending on the type and colour of flower or leaf, the result is either very accurate or abstract.

We gathered the flowers over the course of 2 weeks from the market and florists who could not sell these anymore, because the flowers wilted or they had snapped at the stems. The cotton I sourced was either end of roll or had stains from water damage, which I was able to wash out.

NATURAL COLOUR MANIPULATION

We also demonstrated how to make a textile dye bath of vegetable leftovers: onion skins, beet peels, red cabbage and avocado peels & stones. We took red cabbage to show how to manipulate the colour by changing the pH value. The purple red cabbage dye changed to red or pink when we added vinegar and to blue or green when we added baking soda. The participants could give their printed fabrics a dip-dye in the red cabbage dye bath and then experiment with changing the colour.

Colour manipulation with red cabbage