Into the Skin
2021
Onion Dyed Jacquard Textile Design
In this applied thesis, the topic of natural dyeing under a bigger umbrella of eco-localism (Curtis, 2003), community development and sustainability is discussed.
Physical engagement with local community and hands-on experiments on piece dyeing techninique are the main methods helped used to build up the knowledge.
︎ This project is sponsored by Natural Indigo Finland
︎︎︎ View this project in 2022 FutureBase International Textile Contest
︎︎︎ View this project in 2023 Dailogues: group exhibition curated by aaltoTextiles
The design process is a journey of learning natural dyeing for me.
Unlike previous design projects, I didn’t make a clear mood board but just some pre-settings to control the experiment range and schedule.
In this project, I focused on experimenting on the colors from onions, and used only yarns in white color.
I sketched and designed patterns based on paper-weaving pieces and home gardening images, testing those chosen patterns by weaving with different yarn combinations and dyeing with onion extract.
These test results then became my database and worked as a mood board for this project.
Since the aim is to dye larger pieces rather than samples, I tried to work systematically and documented all details as much as possible to recreate the desired shades.
I designed a technical sheet for documenting important information, including materials, density and such for each test. See example below:
All samples dyed during the process were documented digitally later on. See more details about the developing process and experiment records:
︎Thesis link
︎Natural dyeing report pdf. for download
I wish to bring this project forward after the thesis, since these textiles are designed as fashion-oriented fabrics.
I would love to productize them and bring more updates about the following progress.
Textile product cards:
Phototgrapher & Editor: Yun-Jung Hsieh
