This text is part of the special Pleasures notebook
“What do you ask of a flower except that it be beautiful and fragrant for a minute, poor flower, and then it will be over,” wrote the poet and playwright Paul Claudel. Marie-Eve Dion has a very different relationship with plants, printing these ephemerals one by one on scarves, socks, ribbons, bags, pillowcases and other fabrics, thus making them eternal in her own way. A foray into one of the plant dyeing workshops (ecoprint) which she offers throughout the warm season between her garden and her kitchen, like a sweet summer break to treat yourself to.
You feel like you’re on vacation as soon as you arrive at Marie-Eve Dion’s home in Eastman. The dining room with its cathedral ceiling and large windows showcases the trees that surround her home. The cat comes to greet us, and comes and goes at will. Bought on a whim, her house has also become her workshop, where she creates and offers various vegetable dyeing courses to share her passion.
“My wonder for dyeing has not diminished over time,” says the woman who fell into it somewhat by chance. With a bachelor’s degree in fashion design, she was a costume designer in cinema when she was introduced to plant-based dyeing for simple pleasure. Seduced, she experimented, enrolled in several training courses and finally launched her plant-based dyeing shop Marie-les-bains in spring 2021. “I like picking and working in the garden, it’s something more physical, and then working with fabrics, silk, a creative and delicate job,” she explains.
A bouquet of purple cosmos sits next to a teapot in the middle of the table. There are seven of us attending her workshop that day, sitting side by side facing the craftswoman. Four artists at heart who recently took part in another training given by Marie-Eve Dion, and three initiates—including me.
“Each print is unique to its plant,” says the dyer, opening her notebook in front of us. scratchpbooking grouping together her print tests. “We see a lot of dyeing tips on the Web, especially with anything that is food, like beetroot, red cabbage or black beans,” she continues. “It looks great, but it has no tenacity. It’s not because it stains that it dyes!”
Contrary to popular belief, the blue-red pigment in berries, for example, is not dye-producing, she says. But onion, avocado and pomegranate peels are. Which explains why large Mason jars filled with dried peels line her kitchen counter.
From the garden to the fabrics
Marie-Eve Dion invites us to follow her outside. A miniature version of her main garden, located in Valcourt, surrounds her house. “About 75% of what I use in ecoprint are the plants that I grow, says the craftswoman. You can print with both dried and fresh flowers, but I really like working with the ones I have just picked.
With a wicker basket on her arm and scissors in her hand, she presents the characteristics of each of her plant species. “Dyer’s chamomile makes sun prints. Here, there are marigolds, whose petals I like to use. There, they are cosmos. It is really a prolific flower, this small plant will become a big bush. The red coreopsis provide green prints. The leaves of the staghorn sumac, over there, they will give more yellow, like the flowers of the white yarrow.”
The shade obtained in plant dye is rarely the one that the plants display, explains Marie-Eve Dion while picking here and there. “It’s chemical, it depends on the pigment. Among the wild flowers found in Quebec, we end up with results that are often yellow once printed. It’s not for nothing that I grow so many flowers, to have more colours.”
These are very present in Marie-les-bains’ creations. “I gave myself the mandate to make color, because we have seen a lot of pastels in recent years, with the minimalist movement,” she explains. And because she likes the flamboyant color it provides, she also uses an insect, the cochineal, which she uses whole or in powder form.
Ancestral knowledge that is being lost
Back in the dining room, bouquets in hand, we have fun choosing the flowers, leaves and petals that we arrange on our fabrics. During the workshop, each participant will print a fabric sample and a silk scarf with which she will leave.
Plant dyeing has been used for 5,000 to 6,000 years. The oldest traces that have been found date back to the Neolithic period. The loss of this knowledge is explained by the arrival of synthetic dye in the 19th century.e century. Tough dyes that allow you to create faster, but have a huge environmental footprint. Unlike theecoprintfor which there is growing interest, notes Marie-Eve Dion.
Under the watchful eye of the craftswoman, we fold our moistened fabrics over our flowers, roll them in a piece of used cloth, then in parchment paper, and tie everything tightly. Our little sausages are then “cooked” with steam for 25 minutes in a good old steamer hot dog.
“Bazaars are our best friends!” laughs Marie-Eve Dion. “There is no big community around dyeing or specific tools to do it at home. We have to be creative and use kitchen appliances like my steamer, pots, bamboo steamer baskets…”
We unroll our warm little sausages and marvel at our now colorful scarves. “There is always a level of surprise in what we do,” emphasizes the dyer. “A flower will never come out the same. And you have to have a certain resilience: perfection does not exist.”
A nice way to learn to look differently, perhaps, at the plants we come across in the garden and on our next summer hikes…
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This content was produced by the Special Publications Team of Dutyrelevant to marketing. The writing of the Duty did not take part in it.