Golden Hour is a painterly wash of golden and brighter yellow tones, with occasional hints of orange or soft pink. Each botanical print is one of a kind, hand-dyed in California by Flora Prisma.
The process begins with mordanting, an essential step in many natural dye processes. Fabric is soaked in a mordant bath to help bind color to fiber, improving both washfastness and lightfastness while also influencing the final color.
For the botanically dyed colors in Edit .01 (Daybreak and Golden Hour), we use Symplocos, a plant-based mordant derived from the leaves of a tree native to Indonesia. These trees naturally accumulate alum, allowing the leaves to function as a mordant. Because the material is sourced from fallen leaves, it does not require harvesting the trees themselves. Sourced from The Plant Mordant Project by the Bebali Foundation, Symplocos also supports income opportunities for indigenous and rural communities.
After mordanting, it’s time to add color. Ecoprints, or botanical prints, are impressions of raw plant material transferred directly onto fabric.
To create this abstract print, we focused on an upcycled dye material. Yellow onion skins produce a range of warm tones and are readily available. We sourced them from local farmers markets, along with kitchen scraps collected from family and friends—borrowing their color before they continue on to the compost.
Clean, sorted onion skins from the outer papery layers are torn and arranged on the mordanted silk. The fabric is then rolled into a bundle, secured with a fabric tie, and submerged in water. Heat releases the color from the onion skins into the silk.
In Golden Hour, the result is not a fixed pattern, but an abstract composition completely unique to each piece.
