Students from Level 1 to 4 had fun in Art exploring the amazing range of pigments which is in many different materials found growing in our gardens. It gave us a great opportunity to think about where fabrics got their colour, what is a dye and where dyes originated from.
We looked at the many possible sources in our school yard and we went on a walk to collect things we thought had possibilities. Students collected flowers, stems, leaves, bark, fruit and vegetables and proceded to extract pigment by pounding, cutting, crushing, mixing with hot water (with much care) and either transfered the pigments onto their fabric sample or they created a dye bath in which to dye their fabric.
This was very noisy (Sorry Alan ...our principal's office is next to the Art Studio) but the students were able to really explore how dyes might have been made before synthetic dyes took over (only about 150 years ago).This week we will discuss how successful they were, issues of being colour fast and achieving intensity of colour.
Here are some of their experiments.
Beetroots from our veggie patch were most successful!! We used the leaves as well as the root.
