True Colors: Botanicals Knits
What is more summer than tie-dye?
At SVILU we’ve always loved this perfectly imperfect, hand-dyed craft and after stumbling across natural dyer Liz Spencer, of The Dogwood Dyer, on Instagram we decided to collaborate on a capsule collection of botanically dyed organic cotton sweaters.
Liz uses locally grown and foraged plants, minerals and other natural dyestuffs to make 100% non-toxic, chemical-free dyes. This is significant as synthetic dyes used to color clothes can be tremendously toxic. When wastewater from synthetic dyes is not treated properly (which is commonly the case in India & South East Asia), it contaminates the groundwater, which leads to undrinkable water and extreme soil infertility.
On the other hand, the wastewater from Liz’s natural dye process is so clean that she uses it to water her garden.
SVILU’s Summer collection explores traditional Japanese textiles by way of New Mexico with a color palette inspired by the dusty pinks of the mineral rich American South West, and blues and whites seen in shibori. Working from our inspiration Liz developed two custom dyes for our collection.
The first, a nude pink was developed using the bark from the Quebracho Rojo tree.
The second, our nod to Japanese Shibori dying techniques, she developed from locally sourced organic indigo. Each piece is hand knotted and dyed resulting in totally unique and one-of-a-kind organic cotton sweaters.
