Rainbow making!!!

The creating colour group at care co-ops is making a huge splash of colour!

The latest work of art which is currently under construction is a felted mural completely made from hand and naturally dyed wool that we’ve dyed ourselves. We’ve used madder, weld and woad to create a beautiful pallet of pinks, reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, greys and browns to work from. By dyeing and over dyeing the wool we’ve seen the colours change and deepen and learned to predict what the outcome might be.

In preparation for this work we have learned about mixing paint colours, primary and secondary colours and created our own watercolours from plant matter in a wide range of colours. We created beautiful cards with the watercolours in paper cut technique using sheets of paper that we had coloured using flower petals, leaves, rust, indigo powder etc.... The woad plants that we have been tending are now after some torrential rain thriving in the sunshine and growing in preparation for the leaves to be used in a blue dye vat. The process of the dyed fibres turning blue happens when they hit the air. To get us used to this process we’ve made blue cyanoprint portraits on fabric. We used a photographic process on fabric using photo reactive chemicals, negatives and light to develop the picture. The picture turns from a greeny yellow to a deep blue when it comes into contact with oxygen and sunlight similarly to fibres dyed in a woad vat.