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A dye day, start to finish

01 / 05

Undyed cotton blanks stacked on a workbench.
Procion dye jars and soda ash fixer beside a folded blank.

[hour three, melt water running color]

Three totes of shirts soaking in purple dye.
Close on an ice-dyed tee, the pattern breaking green over white.

it starts white. heavyweight cotton, undyed

The studio, dye totes on the floor and a bench under the windows.

01 — The blank

It starts white

Heavyweight cotton, grown and sewn in the US. We buy them undyed and keep them that way until a city gives us a reason not to.

02 — The freeze

Ice over pigment

Dry pigment goes down first, matched to the city's palette. Then ice, packed over the whole thing. From here on the melt is in charge — we just keep the room cold enough to make it slow.

A tub of hand-labelled dye canisters.

[melt water running color, hour three]

03 — The melt

Where the color breaks

As the ice melts, the pigment splits into the colors it was mixed from. That's the break — the marbling you see at the seams. It can't be repeated, which is why no two pieces match.

Roughly 14 hours, if we've done our job.

Three totes of shirts soaking in purple dye.
The Reference Wall

What we pinned up before we mixed anything

Every journey starts as a wall of photos, swatches, and things we shouldn't have brought back through customs. Belgrade's looked like this.

The Sava at sunset through a tree.
the light at the end of a dye day
A tub of hand-labelled dye canisters.
pigment tests, every jar we own
A scooter parked against a painted wall.
parked, and everything written behind it
A photo booth in a park at dusk.
the photoautomat in the park, still working
Procion dye jars and soda ash fixer beside a folded blank.
the jars, and what fixes them

[spritz on a marble table]

spritz glass, the drawing started here
A residential block in low sun, balconies stacked.
blok grays, off a balcony

[embroidery hoop test]

first embroidery test, rejected

From souvenir to stitch

A thing you'd have brought home anyway, drawn once, stitched forever

[the souvenir itself, photographed on the trip]

01 — the souvenir

02 — the drawing

03 — the stitch