April | Medicinal Dye Plants
Before April I hadn’t dyed anything naturally… unless spilling a glass of red wine onto fabric counts. I’ve done that. More than a few times.
The process seemed to require a lot of grinding and weighing and measuring and boiling… a lot like cooking. Something I don’t do. Well, that’s not exactly true- I can cook pizza or cereal. And on occasion I’ll blend a pre-made smoothie bag {prepped for me by my husband and small child}. So I’ll amend my statement to I don’t boil. Sounds more accurate better.
It’s just that anytime I contemplated boiling up a pot of color I’d have flashbacks. Ask my mom about the time I legit launched a tall pressure cooker of pinquinto beans (👋🏻 Santa Maria) off her stove and into the sky. And by sky I mean a good six feet up into her ceiling lights- shattering them all like 💥 boom 💥
I’ve had some real fiascos in my day.
That said, I was a big YES when I saw that Botanical Colors and Porfirio Gutíerrez were hosting a workshop together. Four days of in-person ✨ Los Angeles adjacent ✨ hands on learning (with other adults in charge of the hot liquids). Talk about the perfect place for me to start.
I couldn’t possibly encapsulate those four days into one journal entry. Instead, I’ll share the tiniest glimpses into the magic that is Porfirio + his studio.
Taking time away to just focus and reflect on my relationship with nature, and create color as a result of that relationship was more prolific than I could’ve imagined. Everything was so serene, as is the Maestro himself.
We respectfully foraged yashi, pruning it from a local riverbed by hand. We knelt on the floor as we slowly ground cochineal to a powder softer than silk. We shared insights while standing watch over bubbling pericon, extracting its color and breathing in the aromatic fragrance. We dyed and overdyed dozens of skeins of wool fibers, everyone working together quietly reveling in what we made.
Beyond sharing his techniques for dyeing, Porfirio also shared another, more special gift— time with his mother, Andrea, a second generation ancestral healer. Andrea came from Oaxaca to share her knowledge of the use of plants as medicine and their healing properties, and to give each of us a healing session. Their collective spiritual understanding of the role plants and rivers/water play in healing, along with the rich cultural context in their traditional village in Mexico— where a deep relationship between plants being used to create color as well as medicine exists was enlightening.
Right before my healing session I had a classic me moment.
Because Andrea speaks Zapotec, an indigenous dialect of about 100,000 people in/around Oaxaca, Porfirio was our translator. One of the details they shared about their tradition is that sickness and anxiety (in the body) is classified as “heat”. Healing anyone from outside of their village is a rarity, and as Andrea went through our group one by one, she was surprised at the amount of heat we had. It was much more than she’s accustomed to within their small village. As we sat quietly, watching each other receive our sessions/blessings, I wondered if Porfirio could ask her how much heat was coming from me during my session. But what came out of my mouth was, “Can your mom tell me how hot I am”?
Took me a second to realize why he started laughing so hard.
At the end of the four days, as we sat together sharing a meal, I knew this hadn’t been just a class. It was an experience that has and will shape me as a dyer going forward. And I will forever be thankful… and maybe less hot.
More about |
Maestro Porfirio Gutíerrez | Zapotec textile artist | natural dyer | all around kind and generous teacher 🧶
Botanical Colors | my go to for all things natural dye (I’ve been collecting their supplies/textiles/books in preparation for years). Be sure to visit their How To’s if you’re naturally dye curious 🌿
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