#i'll take photos of my current dye experiments once theyre done

[handweavers]

when i took a dye workshop on bali last year i worked with a traditional dye, ceriops tagal (indian mangrove), made from the heartwood and bark of the tree. it's been used as a very strong orange through russet through brown dye for thousands of years across the indian ocean world (so coastal eastern africa through south and southeast asia) and is notably used for dyeing orange through brown in indo-malay batik. it's a difficult dye to access now, though, especially if you're trying to do so ethically because the indian mangrove is endangered. there are some orgs that have sustainable grow ops across indonesia that harvest the dye only every few years and do so as a by-product of local industry, because ceriops tagal is an important tree for many villages across the region for wood and other necessary purposes. not harvesting the wood at all isn't helpful as a solution, so these orgs harvest at a sustainable pace and use as much of the trees as possible to reduce waste (and i believe they run as workers co-ops, so all workers are paid fair wages and decide their working conditions)

all that is to say that i got my hands on some of the dye extract from one of these orgs and made a dye vat a few days ago and left it to sit so the colour can improve while i prepare some cotton and silk yarns to be dyed. i started doing the actual dyeing today, and the process is a lot like working with indigo, in the sense that the dye sits cold in a large bucket and you dip the fiber for five minutes before wringing and letting it hang to dry. successive dips in the vat deepen the colour, and the vat can be used until it's exhausted (ie no more colour comes out of it). it gets stronger with age, and a unique characteristic of the ceriops dye is that the dye gets darker in the sun. the chemicals in the plant that cause this unique uv-darkening aspect are also found in unripe fermented persimmons, which have been used as a dye in japan (kakishibu) for centuries. both dyes also have a unique feature in that they create a textile that is water resistant, so the dyes have been used to create waterproof stencils and the sails of ships.

the ceriops bark is in the right cup in the top left photo; the orange dye in the other two photos is the colour typical of ceriops tagal.