WEEK 12 - COLOURS AND SAMPLES

This week has been heavily focused on sketchbook work, such as documenting and analysing my samples and their techniques. Developing my technical file has also taken place this week, I have created sheets that document my different dyed yarns and wool swatches with their recipes detailed. This has allowed me to continue dyeing more yarn into the same colours as my other samples, keeping my colour palette cohesive. As I have been experimenting with lots of natural dyes, I have now fully developed my colour palette as I have explored a wide range of colours that I feel showcase the ones seen in the Scottish Highlands and help celebrate just how bright and vibrant natural dyes can be. I created a colour palette board, which has helped me in my sample planning as I can see what colours would work well together.

I came across a video on Instagram, involving a way of creating more blended patterns seen within fashion, which was using an airbrush to blend colours and create interesting patterns. I felt really inspired and decided to try this as it may help achieve what I was originally aiming for when dip-dyeing my samples. I created a batch of 4 natural dyes and started testing the air brush machine with these dyes on some test pieces of knit. This technique was interesting and fun to work with, although I was not able to achieve the results I wanted as unlike with a dye bath where the fabric has been left in the dyes for a couple of minutes to saturate, the spray only allows for a small layer of dye to penetrate the fabric. After washing the knitted samples out, the colour had faded a lot and was not good enough for a final sample.

Like how I have done before, I did not want to waste any of this dyed yarn, so I documented its original form as a development and unravelled the samples. I created new patterns using knit-de-knit, adding in more vibrant yarns amongst the lighter yarn and created interesting samples that were developed and elevated. This process of reusing development samples that have maybe not went to plan is a great way of staying sustainable and not wasting any of the precious materials and dyes that have went into its creation. This week has been busy in learning how to airbrush especially, but with this I have created two new exciting samples.