Natural Dyes – Lots of Hard Work and Passion

This is Part 3 of our 5 Part Series on Amazing Natural Dyes.

Have you ever wondered if those crustations you see on certain trees could be at all useful?

The ones you see in this video are built by small grubs called Klung before they move on. And they are a fantastic source of natural dye colours for our Thai silk.

Natural Dyes and Natural Silks

These natural dye materials work perfectly with our natural silks.

Our handmade Thai silk uses only totally natural ingredients for colors and color-fixing making it quite unique.

The klung crustations you see in the video are another of Dao’s grandma’s secret natural dye ingredients and an important part of our totally natural silk creations. We normally boil the empty crustations for many, many hours before they are ready for any dye purposes. Then they absorb perfectly with our Thai silk threads

But this is just a quick demonstration. Dao popped them into a plastic glass and if the water was hotter you would see an even more rapid change in colour.

Time, Effort and Passion

Now normally we apply the natural dyes to the Thai silk fibers before weaving. But on this particular occasion we are using the klung natural dye colour to change the colour of some silk scarves for a particular customer. Whether before or after weaving, the natural dye process is a very, very time consuming and at times, physically tiring and demanding process.

Dao will spend more than 10 hours perfecting the natural dye colours of these scarves. The scarves will be dyed then cleaned then dyed and dyed again many times. Then finally we will add our special natural mordants to ensure the colours will be permanent. It’s a real labour of love to create our natural Thai silks using ingredients and methods passed down by my grandmother. But the end results are always so beautiful and passionately  loved by our customers.

This is Part 3 of our Amazing Natural Dyes series of posts ….click here for Part 1 and Part 2 (opens as a new page)

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