Sky-High Natural Dyes by Jennifer Hoover

In June of 2014, I was bracing myself for my last few days in the Himalayan village I had come to call home. I had spent 3 months there, befriending a few women with whom I worked on various textile projects. As we wrung out the last of our skeins of yarn over a dye bath, Nirmala commented, “You will always remember the time you had only two students.”

“No,” I countered, “I will remember the time I had two teachers.”

“Three students, three teachers,” we agreed.

This, to me, is the power of participatory action research: we are all students, and all teachers; all researchers, and all research subjects. And so I am thrilled to be back for further collaboration, with the support of the Blum Center. I am here in Kullu Valley working with some participants in a women's self-help group (www.whims.in) who produce textile goods as a way of generating some independent income and preserving traditional craft skills. Although the women have started working with the acrylic yarns which are available in the shops, they are also working to access local fiber resources, such as wool from sheep herded through the region. The focus of my work in this project is to explore the potential for using plant-based dyes from agricultural by-products and non-timber forest resources.

I have identified some potential materials by searching through ethnobotanical studies of surrounding regions. While it seems straightforward to work from published lists and ask locals to identify plants with which they are familiar, it is actually rather difficult. Languages vary from valley to valley, so the local names provided in a study of a neighboring community may not be familiar to the people here. I can use the scientific names to search the internet for pictures, but local varieties may look different and local methods of categorization may not align with standard taxonomy. And once we have determined that a plant does grow here, there is the matter of knowing how and when to harvest it, what plant parts to use, and how to prepare them for the dye bath. So even with well-documented materials, there is a lot of trial-and-error experimentation to be done. The women have also identified some plants that they think will produce various colors, and suggestions of local, less expensive substitutions for some materials (for example, using a local variety of pomegranate in place of limes to acidify the dye baths).

My homestay hosts have graciously allowed us to take over their porch and yard with bags full of wool to be spun into yarn, piles of berries drying in the sun, and murky bottles full of walnut hulls and rotting wood soaking in water to become dye baths. Passing neighbors stop to watch and ask about our strange activities. With any luck, in a few weeks they'll instead be admiring the skeins of colored wool drying on the line.