Colorfast Botanical Dyes to Paint, Stamp, & Stencil on Fabric with Puakea Forester

Colorfast Botanical Dyes to Paint, Stamp, & Stencil with Puakea Forester

You will start by going over best practices when approaching natural colorants by learning how to prepare cellulose and protein fibers for optimal uptake of dyes via scouring, tannin, and immersion mordanting. Gain solid replicable results creating thickened dyes for a colorful palette from ethically sourced tried and true extracts, grounds, and raw material, This is accomplished by documenting your experiments of hue variations on the percentage of dyestuff to WOF (weight of fabric), adding PH modifiers, color mixing, color layering. You will learn how to design and carve repeat patterns for stamps, layering, freehand painting, masking, and stenciling for direct application techniques. As a reference tool for future projects, you will mix and build your palette on a well-recorded color wheel or grid-swatched wall hanging. To finish your pieces, you will permanently fix the colors to the cloth by steaming.

Class fee: $130/$125 VAC members, plus a $110 supply fee.

 Jani K. Puakea Forester was born in Kahuku, O‘ahu to Rebecca, a woodworker, and Jan Fisher, an art professor at Brigham Young University-Hawaii for more than 20 years. Puakea attended Ka‘a‘awa Elementary School where her kumu (teacher) Aunty Kawai Aona-Ueoka, instilled in her a love for hula and making kapa. As haumana (students) of Aunty Kawai, Puakea would go to her home and learn to plant, harvest and process the wauke (paper mulberry) in her yard. When Puakea moved to Hawai‘i Island in 2015, she studied kapa making with Roen Hufford and immersed herself in all things kapa in order to be as true to the arts as possible. She also studied with O‘ahu-based Dalani Tanahy. Puakea is a teacher of kapa but insists that she is not a kumu—that she is here to share her kapa aloha and to walk side by side with the people she teaches. She has brought the ancient to the contemporary by creating beautiful high-end women’s leather handbags, dress shirts, mu‘u mu‘u, belts, and jewelry by attaching kapa as the primary ornamentation. She holds classes and workshops as well as retreats for anyone interested in learning to make implements, plant pigments and kapa.