This month I give you a summary of techniques that can be used to make eco-effective designs.

A lot of our textile products are decorated. We choose a specific colour to dye the textile, combine different yarns in a woven material or print a design on a textile. Most of these traditional decoration techniques are not eco-effective because materials from the biological and the technological cycle are fused together. This makes it very difficult to separate the materials for recycling or biodegradation. E.g. silkscreen printing ink, which is non-biodegradable, printed on a biodegradable fabric like organic cotton.

Nowadays we have a lot of different garments in our wardrobe, but what if you would only need a few items and you could make a lot of different garments and bags with those items? This is possible with Furoshiki.

Furoshiki is the Japanese art of folding and knotting.
With Furoshiki you always start with a square cloth. By knotting and folding this fabric in different ways different ‘packages’ are created. Originally this technique was used to take laundry to wash houses in Japan. Later more products where packed in the square cloths to transport them and currently Furoshiki is also accepted as wrapping paper.

I made a bag using the Furoshiki method for Chatoui.

On the pictures you see how you can fold the bag. If you google Furoshiki you will find much more possibilities.

At the moment toxic chemicals are often used to dye textiles. To attach the dye to the (plant- or animal-based) textile many toxic fixating agents are needed. However, there are environmentally friendly ways to dye fabrics. One example of this is dyeing with eucalyptus, which Wieteke Opmeer taught Fioen van Balgooi.

With the silver grey leaf of the eucalyptus plant it is possible to create many different colours and shades. You can create bright orange to light yellow shades, but also brown, green and greyish shades. There are many different types of eucalyptus that all have their own leaf shape. You can also create patterns with the leaves. Because of this you don’t have to use toxic silkscreen ink.

The eucalyptus dye attaches best to animal-based textiles (such as wool and silk). To use plant-based textiles you have to prepare these first. Fixating textile dyed with eucalyptus is not necessary because the plant-dye attaches very well on its own. When washing out the tests almost no dye came off because of this.

To create different colours you can use fresh leaves (bright orange on wool, salmon on organic cotton), old leaves (camel on wool, light camel on organic cotton), fresh leaves with copper elements (red/brown on wool, grey/brown on organic cotton) and fresh leaves with iron elements (brown on wool, but dark grey on organic cotton) Although I personally prefer not to use copper or iron because of the harm it can do to the environment.

The used plant material can be composted after use, the used dye water can safely return to nature because it does not contain any toxic additions, however please pay attention to the PH-value of the water. The water- and material use is also low. When dyeing with eucalyptus there are many factors that may influence the colour outcome such as; the kind of plant, the hardness of the water, the temperature and the time span. So for industrial use this application is not yet suitable.

Currently many patterns are made with silk-screen printing; this leaves a layer of paint behind on the garment, which lowers the value of the material. For instance, when shredding garments, small bits of paint will stay behind on the fibres. It is possible to make patterns with laser cutting.

The paint often contains harmful chemicals. The whole silkscreen printing process costs an enormous amount of water. The design is made by rubbing an emulsion on the screen and lighting this with UV rays. Cleaning the screen in between different colours produces polluted water. With laser cutting you can make all sorts of patterns. You can also work with layers to create different patterns or work with the fact that synthetic fabrics can be melted with a laser. It is recommended to use synthetic fabrics or non-wovens, to prevent the fabric from fraying. Refinity made textiles that are more flexible because of the laser design. Refinity also worked with several layers to create designs from different colours.

Originally labourers wore smocked aprons. The smock was not only used as decoration, but also had the practical goal to keep together the fabric in strong, small folds.

The advantage of smocking is that you use a patch of textile that exists of one whole. By tying this large patch together in a certain patters a design will appear and the patch will be smaller. After usage this smocked patch can be undone and you will again have the large patch that can be reused. 

Currently seams are a problem when recycling textiles, for example with recycling of jeans. They have to be cut loose because they are too thick to process. Because smocked textile is not stitched often there are not many hard seams that have to be cut loose at the processing company when recycling. 

But sometimes you do have to tie knots in your yarn when smocking. To enhance the process of recycling or biodegradation you can use the same material for the yarn as the fabric. For example biodegradable yarn (tencel or organic cotton) when you have a biodegradable fabric (tencel or organic cotton)

Refinity used the ‘Canadian smock’ technique to experiment with different shape possibilities. When patterns are tightened they look different than when they are loose, which creates nice effects.

Punching provides the possibility to create designs without silk-screen printing, but with colour, by using fibres in different colours.

By punching you attach two materials to each other using needles. It is similar to a sewing machine, but with five needles, which have barbs attached that pull the fibre through the fabric with great speed. Because the fibres are not completely smooth they stick in between the fabric. Refinity made textiles that consist of multiple colours, a dark background, and the lighter ones as the punched fibre. This time Refinity chose wool as background and fibre, but naturally other fabrics can be used. It is important that a biodegradable textile is used with a biodegradable punched fibre. When using synthetic textile it is best to use a synthetic fibre, to keep the bio- and techno cycle easily separable.

April 2014:
Interesting to know is that there is now a machine that makes it possible to 3D print textile products with the punching technique: http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/printed-teddy-bears/

Synthetic materials have the characteristic that they keep the shape in which they are heated. These fabrics are often easy to iron, because they virtually ‘melt’ back into the original shape. But of course you can also make use of this easy-to-reshape feature.

Refinity has made various folding patterns in the textiles and then heated these under a press, after which patterns originate in the textile. For one version Refinity used heat-sensitive sublimation ink. Refinity sublimated the blue colour, then created the folds in the fabric and then sublimated a dark colour over it. The ink itself has not been tested on environmental-friendliness yet.