When thinking about the colour scheme for my branding, I wanted to go back to the root of the research I was doing, the natural environment, both on earth and on mars. Earth especially has such a rich spectrum of colour, and this seems like a great place to start.

I have been looking closely at nature, and so I wanted to experiment with natural dyes, to see what colours I could draw directly from vegetation.

I went to Richmond park studios and observed a process of dyeing wool with walnut husks:

wool before dyeing^^

wool soaking in the walnut husk dye bath ^^

finished wool ^^

Following this I was inspired to carry out my own experiments with natural dyes. I wanted to try and achieve colours in a similar pallete to those seen in my research images:  browns, oranges, red/pinks, greens and greys.

I’ve been looking at a book by Ethel Meirat, the queen of natural dyes!

And I saw there was an exhibition abut her work at Ditchling: “Dyeing Now: contemporary makers celebrate ethel mairet’s legacy” and I contacted them to see if I could look at the archive, they said yes. but i the end our trip to Ditchling was cancelled so nevermind….

MY DYE EXPERIMENTS:

^^collecting onion skins for this experiment for a little while (hand for size comparison)

^^im going to do 2 experiments, one with brown onon skins, one with red and see how different they turn out, if at all

^^ boiling the skins for an hour, brown onions

^^ red onions, the colour does look a bit richer/darker than the brown skins

^^ I also did turmeric, but I forgot to take a photo of it in the pan….

in the metal bowl, I soaked the wool for 48 hours, so that it can absorb water evenly, and therefore take the dye evenly

^^ red onion skin, brown onion skin, fresh turmeric root

^^ then I added the wool to the bottles to leave for a few days, i may need to boil the wool in the dye but I thought I’d try this method first.

NEXT, I tried avocado skins and pits, as this is supposed to make a pale pink dye!

^^ same scenario, boiled for an hour

(I still need to take a photo of the final dye and then dye some wool but I didnt have time that day! will update soon!)