SAVE THE DATE- April 17-21, 2023!
We’ll be opening this class for registration on Thursday, January 12, 2023 at 10am HST/12pm Pacific/3pm Eastern time.
Well known worldwide for her plant-based palettes, natural dyes and place-based recipes, Sasha will take us on a color tour in her hometown on the Big Island in Hawai’i. Botanical Colors President Kathy Hattori and Communications Director Amy DuFault will be your partners over the course of a wondrous week of exploring natural dyes through by-products and biodiversity on the Big Island. Working from Sasha’s new workshop space and dye studio in Volcano Village, we’ll create holistic hues and natural palettes from local food and floral waste, and delve into the slowness of edible, floral and medicinal plants.
We’ll learn to “cook with color”, and coax unique plant-based hues to create natural dyes from scratch . We’ll also experiment with zero-waste and regenerative design processes, encouraging an inquiry of seeing and being with the depth of beauty found in the potential of local and seasonal Big Island weeds, food, and floral waste.
During the week, we will collaborate with talented local farmers, ecologists, and textile artisans helping to inspire us to see the importance of beauty, biodiversity, and botanical creativity through plant-based palettes. We will learn to work with regenerative, natural dye practices, surface design techniques, and ways of gathering through color and community arts. At the end of our week-long workshop, we’ll share a day of floral crafting, and inspired plant-based cooking and dyeing together- fully engaging our color senses and the abundant offerings of botanical colors and biodiversity on the Big Island.
Highlights For the Big Island x Botanical Colors Workshop:
-Foraging and visiting local farmers markets or farms to make natural color from bi-products of tropical fruit, floral and vegetable waste.
-Creating holistic hues through cooking, floral arranging, and medicinal aspects as the inspiration and origin of our plant-based palettes.
-Hiking and foraging, identifying and learning about dye plants in context of weeds, waste and regenerative practices.
-Collecting saltwater and rainwater for explorations in natural color processes.
-Creating a unique and holistic plant-made palette from start to finish.
-Working with whole ecological systems; learning the different techniques of natural dyeing and working with a biodiversity of ingredients, fibers, and techniques.
-Delving into slow processes, working in collaboration with plants and people, communities and ecologies.
-Learning to document the process with beautiful images, sketches and color-based note taking.
-All the tools and materials needed to create our range of color palettes from weeds and waste, as well as larger samples to explore techniques in surface design and direct application of the dyes we make, as well as a larger finished textile created with Big Island botanicals.