This weekend its summer.pop.shopping market in Berlin; a huge design-market for small fashion-labels, artists, creative people…
…and Treches will be there!
you might even get a glimpse of the wintercollection -because it is actually about finished, we just have to do the photoshooting! (i’ll announce it here of course when it’s ready..)
so, its badeschiff/arena this weekend, from early morning till late night, both saturday and sunday. see you there!
..finally dyeing some fabrics… yellow!!
I were, really, close to giving up on the whole ‘dyeing with food-colours’- project, when I decided to make one last attempt after reading about dyeing with red onions in an old ‘tips and tricks’-book…
(Since my last post about dyeing I’ve been trying out the sodium carbonate and also “urea” which should make the colour stronger -but without ANY success! :( -so seriously: dyeing with beetroot is NOT possible! believe me! I’ve tried too many times now!..)
anyway: here’s a dyeing-experiment that actually worked out!!:::
I collected the skin/peelings from about three red onions.
(what’s good about this ‘source of dye’ is that you could keep it for ages -and collect the skins every time you use red onions for cooking. Cause if you want to dye big pieces of fabric you’re going to need a lot! -my three onions was enough for about 200g of fabric (means 1/2 t-shirt..)
I don’t know if this is really making any difference: I soaked the fabrics in sodium carbonate (“soda”)-water-mix with a pH of 11. This is to prepare the fibers to take up the dye..
cooking the peelings for about twenty minutes -the colour changes from dark purple to dark brown -a quite disgusting one..
Then I filtered the skins out.
Here I’ve added the fabric and let it boil for another 15 minutes (So if you have a new t-shirt you want to dye, it’s probably going to shrink!)
Afterwards, I rinsed out the fabric with cold water.
..As usual (!!!) most of the dye goes out, but this time…
..the fabric keeps some of the colour!!! (jippie!)
What you see on this picture is (from right): dyeing with beetroot-pieces (didn’t work..), dyeing with beetroot-”juice” (also didn’t work) and, on the left: dyeing with red onions!!!
-yes, well, the colour is not really a strong one, but it’s at least something!
..And, I believe, with the skin of some twenty onions, it would be strong yellow/brownish!
(Unfortunately, I’m not really into yellow this season.. maybe next year… ;))
Home from holidays with butterflies in the stomach…
Seems I’ve been neglecting the blogging for a while — even though I so much wanted to tell you all about my new discovery when it comes to dyeing: organic ready-to-use-dyes from Öko-norm (available online on Lebensfluss), Jaaa— It’s not so DIY as my previous attempts with foodcolours –but it works!!!
AND they sell separate fixer for setting the dyes -maybe thats just what I missed for my dyeing experiments.
Anyway, now I can also dye stuff blue! (here with red spots..-not really a success..)
..And then it was suddenly definitely time for a holiday.. so I went for a week to norway and sweden -and to ease my bad conscience about flying I decided to drive my motorbike there and camp outside -which was all very nice until i came back to germany and got caught in the middle of nowwhere in the extremely shitty weather in north-east germany yesterday (guess everybody going early to fusion noticed that…) ah, it all ended good, but I learned now why people prefer waterproof motorbike-boots to veja-sneakers when they’re out driving…
Today was back to work, and I’m extremely excited about theKey next week! I got some new fabric-samples from Lichtschatz to make a couple of new prototypes for the coming winter-collection, even though we’re both still sowing the current collection, (“we” being me and Sandra Tiersch, a friend who’s a tailor and might be doing even more work with Treches in the future! I hope!)
Well, see you on wednesday!..
A new attempt on dyeing cotton with natural food-colours. Successful? (UPDATED)
Seems like forever now, I’m trying out different methods and food for dyeing cotton -the ultimate goal of course being that I can include hand-dyed-with-food fabrics in a treches’ collection. But until now, the colours all wash out in the first rinsing.
What I’ve recently learned though, is that the pH of the fabric has to be strong basic -pH 10,5 till 11! So I’ve ordered some Sodium Carbonate and pH-strips from the drug store.
(I dont know excactly how Sodium Carbonate is made, but I read that the “No Impact Man” who wanted to live sustainable for one year, started to use it instead of soap, so it should not be too bad.)
Sodium Carbonate is also used in cooking, but not in the very-basic relations I’m about to mix, so better wear gloves..
The fabric is soaked in the mix for about half an hour.
Ah, yes, Before all this I boiled the red cabbage for a couple of hours, and got a dark-purple liquid (thats the wine-bottle on the photo), as well as loads of stinky (!!) overboiled cabbage.
Now, I put the soaked cotton-patch into the cabbage-liquid and… andddd… It turns.. green?
Yes, definitely, it’s suddenly all bright green! (The liquid changed colour when I added the basic cotton to it!)
..Well, green is quite cool actually, and better than no colour at all!
I’m also trying out if the left over cabbage can be use for dyeing (because I’m for sure not gonna eat it!.. :)
So.. Now it has to stay soaked for about 24 hours. And then we’ll see if the colour stays when the dye is washed out…
(to be continued..)
UPDATE :
well… after 24 hours, the smell was getting really bad. and the fabric should be ready -bright green was my plan!
but, as you can see, the fabric that had been soaked in the cabbage-”juice” washed right out again -a slight hint of mint-green maybe, but thats not good enough!
this is the fabric where I put the pieces of cabbage – it looks a lot better! after cleaning it though, most of the colours wash out, but actually -some parts of it is definitely green!
so, what’s next? I want to try to find a way to intensify the dyes, and maybe try something else than cabbage (to bad it’s not beet-root season..) —i’m not giving up yet!
the Baobab dress has it’s name from the Baobab-tree, which I met and was impressed by in Mali (some months ago).
The Baobab-tree grows in all of Africa but looks different depending on the conditions where it is found -”my” Baobabs, which grew in a very dry area where wood is scarce, were mostly short and young, like this one. (The hay is put in the tree so the goats won’t eat it)
As the Baobab only has leaves in the rain-season, I never saw them, but imagined they would look somehow like in my drawing… (which they actually don’t)
This tree is a major resource and the list is long for all the things it can be used for (wood, ropes, belts, strings, baskets, food, spices, soap…), and the aubergine-shaped fruits is important in local medicine.
As I came home to Berlin I drew a drawing of it, and made it into a two-screen silkscreen-print. The first screen is the colourful leaves, but as they have four different colours, instead of using the standard silkscreen-technique (of “scraping” colour over the whole screen), I apply each colour with a brush through the screen (using a very rough screen-fabric so the paint won’t stick and dry in it). This makes the colours mix a little where they meet.
The second screen is the black lines of the tree, and it proved very difficult to match it exact on top of the leaves. It seems the fabric has shrunk a little as the paint dried.
The dress has a small textile-”belt” and I didn’t want to hide the print, so I printed the part the belt would have hidden on the belt!
and here’s the finished dress:
..and here: (..with the belt around the arm ..to hide that the model’s bandage for recently being bit by a dog… :) )
cross-border: the new collection from fashion/streetwear-label treches, inspired by heat, west-african clothing and– ..friedrichshain!
..Proudly presenting the new collection, just in time for summer 2009.
With inspiration collected far away as well as right outside our studio-door!
It’s all online on www.treches.com
(but the paper-catalogues still takes a couple of days)
treches has a new logo – what will be next?
It’s about time – and it took a lot of time – : treches finally has a new logo!
As everybody here suddenly had so professional-looking logos I saw it was time for also treches to get a small make-over.
The logo is designed by Bureau Bruneau (jee… my brother!).
And if there’s soon gonna be some new summer-clothes wearing this label?? – it’s on it’s way!
what’s this guy doing wearing a [treches] hoodie?
what’s this guy doing wearing a [treches] hoodie?
…and what’s he cooking?
I’ve made it from a plastic banner..
I’ve been working for a while on the cut for this bag, making prototypes, cause I wanted it to be “sculpted” in shape (eh, keep the shape also when it’s empty), and some days ago I finally got my hands on the proper material for this kind of bag: commercial banners. …
The banners are great because of it’s structure, but horrible to work with! I wanted to offer these bags for sale but after spending several hours cutting and sowing this one, i think I’m gonna let it be with just one…
This is a nerdy article about cotton-dyeing..
Some of you might have been following my attempts to dye fabrics with food-colours (on my webpage) -Attempts that now seem very amateur, after what I’ve been reading the last days..:
I had problems fixing the colour to the fabrics – in the pot they were bright red, but as I pressed the water out, the colour went away with it.
I tried with both vinegar and salt as fixer as I read about this in a yarn-dyeing forum online. But then I came across this:
“Vinegar is not the answer!
Many people who know nothing about this subject recommend ‘setting’ dye in cotton clothing with vinegar. In fact, vinegar can do nothing useful for cotton dyes.”
..and felt quite stupid. ..then this:
“Salt won’t do it, either
Salt can be useful in dyeing, by encouraging the fiber not to repel the dye, or by making the dye less soluble, but it will not itself fix the dye to the fiber.”
Now, I’ve learned that the problem is the pH-value. For dyeing cellulose fibres, such as cotton, linen, hemp etc., the pH (of the water) has to be raised to 10,5 to 11, (=acid) for the fabrics to take the pigment.
The usual and least risky way of doing this is by using sodium carbonate -e.g. washing soda. It’s sold as a powerful “soap” for cleaning just about everything, but there’s usually been added bleach, perfume and a variety of chemicals to it. Actually sodium carbonate can be found naturally and it’s not toxic -although acid. (According to wikipedia it’s also used for making pretzels…)
And that’s where the “strange, sugar-like substance” I got from the indigo-dyer in Ennde, Mali comes into the picture.. (see post “natural indigo”)
“[Sodium carbonate]…can occur naturally in arid regions, especially in the mineral deposits (evaporites) formed when seasonal lakes evaporate”
-Yes, the dyer DID tell me that they mixed ashes with mud (from the evaporated seasonal lake) but I could not understand why on earth… and assumed it’s just because “they use mud for everything”… t-t-t
well, dyeing with food has turned into a kind of chemic-project and is not at all as easy as I first assumed. But as I understand some more of it now I will try to get some pH-measure-strips and pure sodium carbonate, and then try the old beetroot-experiment again.
sources:
http://www.pburch.net/dyeing.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_carbonate
Das nachhaltige mode/streetwear label [treches] wurde im frühling 2008 gegründet; aus Überzeugung, daß Ökokleidung auch trendy und bunt sein kann und soll. Die Kleidung wird aus ökologisch und fair hergestellte Stoffen genäht, mit dem Fokus auf Recycling.
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