Description
Layered. Mysterious. Practical.
Wrap your fabric with dye plants, modifiers, and botanicals, then steam to create impressions. Unlock this beautiful botanical dyeing practice at our Gauley Bridge Natural Dye Studio & Fiber Mill.
Bundle dyeing is where practical plant knowledge meets serendipitous beauty. This 3-hour workshop introduces the mordanting methods and botanical combinations that create lasting, layered impressions from regional dye plants. You’ll learn why black walnut releases color differently than madder root, how pokeweed responds to iron, and which spring greens produce the clearest prints through steam.
Working with botanicals and foraged materials from the Gauley watershed, you’ll create multiple bundles using different wrapping techniques and modifier combinations. Each bundle is a botanical education — you’ll see how soil chemistry affects color, why timing matters, and how the same plant produces different results on protein versus cellulose fibers.
This is a water-wise technique that uses significantly less water than immersion dyeing, perfect for small-batch work and home studios. It’s also ideal for overdyeing stained or faded textiles — bring an item to refresh if you’d like. We’ll cover proper pre-treatment for different fibers, how to read your results to understand what happened in the bundle, and how to replicate (or deliberately vary) your outcomes.
What You’ll Create: 3-4 bundled samples to unwrap at home (results appear after cooling)
