Plant based beauty on fabric
PLANT BASED BEAUTY ON FABRIC
SUSTAINABLE BOHO FASHION MALLORCA
PHOTOGRAPHY BY YELLO THERE
I love working with my hands and testing new textile techniques, always with sustainability in mind.
The past week, we experimented with plant based fabric dyes for our upcoming spring line, ISLA.
It was fun and instructive. Also, watching the natural shades coming to life was extremely rewarding,
like a magical alchemy.
But before showing you the making of our ISLA plant dyed line, I thought I’d share some thought about sustainable fashion and how we can all make our fashion footprint a little lighter.
Sometimes we think that we should shift from fast fashion labels to sustainable fashion labels all at once, and it can be challenging at times. But it does not always need to be a sudden, radical shift. If you can, that's perfect.
But there really are a million little steps we can take, all of them doable by most of us.
Are you curious?
I would love to share more ideas and easy projects in the next weeks. Plus,
Fashion Revolution week is around the corner, and spring is the perfect season to pick up new, more conscious fashion habits.
Here is a little (FUN) list of actions you can take to make your fashion footprint a little lighter.
- Learning how to sew, and become able to repair/upcycle your clothes (maybe attending one of our sewing workshops)
- Dyeing your white (or not so white anymore :) garments (vegetable fibers like cotton/viscose) with plan based dyes (read post below) or take a Plant based dyeing course with us (book here)
- Clothes swapping (we will organize a clothing swap soon in Palma, in collab with the ladies at Girl Gone International
And here are some PLANT BASED FABRIC DYEING tips.
Once you have the supplies and the tools, it’s a smooth process.
And the best thing is, it’s a very experimental technique: you make your own recipes and test them on little fabric swatches to reach the desired shades.
We used 3 liters of water to dye 400 gr of fabric.
The first step is mixing Alum (the crystal used as natural deodorant) with water (10g for 1 liter to mordant the fabric (this will open the fibers to receive the colors), boil the mix, and soak the garment or fabric swatches for 1 hour.
Second step: play with the plant powders: mix water and pigments in different proportions, boil in a pot and let the fabric soak. We left our dress and fabric swatches overnight to get richer shades.
Step three: rinse with cold water, and machine wash with a gentle washing program (max 30ºC) to remove the excess color and fix the pigment.
You will have variances in their colour due to the natural dying process, and it’s beautiful that each piece has slightly different shades.
