Tutor: Siân Lester
Times: 10:30 - 16:30
Join Welsh textile artist Siân Lester for a hands-on, enjoyable, and fulfilling botanical dye experience. Siân will share her knowledge and skills for a two-day delve into the heritage craft of dyeing with plants. We will explore a range of foraged and cultivated plants that have close links to the local and global history of Wales plus some food-waste. You will learn how to successfully mordant cloth and yarn and make up dye baths to achieve a spectrum of colourful, long-lasting hues from an accessible range of sources. We will also use modifiers to alchemically shift colours to extend the colour palette.
You will gain:
• Practical hands-on experience and knowledge of the step-by-step process of mordanting, preparing, dyeing, and modifying dye baths.
• Insights into ethnobotanical, historical, mythological and cultural contexts of botanical dyeing and plant life.
• Insights into contemporary, ethical, and sustainable application to craft and art practices.
• Practical and accessible knowledge and recipes of dyeing methods to continue experimenting afterwards.
Siân will assist you with making a record of all the dyeing, so that you leave with a small logbook for future reference and some cloth and yarn to take away to use for your making. Suitable for beginners and advanced - no previous dyeing experience necessary, also open to those who already have some textile or dyeing experience and would like to expand their skills further.
Siân Lester is an artist with a long-established career in textiles, specialising in sustainable approaches associated with her season-based dyeing, art, and research. She integrates and shares these processes within her visual and socially engaged arts practice. Siân has focused on experimenting and researching extensively over the years with local and global plant dyes and wool sources. She has attended and spoken at many international dye/craft conferences, widening her knowledge, and learning from master dyers; always feeling that the process is a constant evolution of knowledge, thinking and making. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, worked collaboratively and on educational and community-based projects. Her practice and teaching move away from commercial, chemical-based
textile processes to a slower, kinder, and more ethical approach, rooted within the rhythms and cycles of the environment. Siân’s methods encourage multi-sensory bonds with plants and colour, supporting biophilic and conscious connections to place, land, and local ecologies, while intermingling notions of heritage, folklore, mythology, and herbalism.
All materials and recipes will be supplied plus aprons and gloves. You will need to wear some old clothes and bring a notebook if you’d like to make notes.