Seek Process: The Cirrus Stripe
If you know anything about us at Seek Collective, you know we love nothing more than to geek out about the process of making our textiles and clothing. This holds true for our most recent capsule as it brings two beloved techniques together: natural dyeing and handloom weaving.
The light and dark blue shades found in the cirrus stripe and indigo color-block were created from the indigo plant (pictured above left) and the grey color in the stripe was created using the moringa plant and iron vinegar. The lighter blue required only one to two dips in the indigo vat while the darker blue shade required five to six dips in the indigo vat.
Indigo is an incredible plant and one that has been used for dyeing cloth for at least 6,000 years. These days it is actually quite rare to find cloth that is truly dyed from only natural indigo. Many commercial indigo vats will claim to be natural but actually be mainly chemical synthetic dye with only a small trace amount of the natural indigo plant. This often happens because indigo is costly and also because natural indigo vats require time to recover after a certain amount of use before they can be used again.
This is why our natural dye partners have so many indigo dye vats, which you can see above. This allows for each vat to have the needed time of rest before being used again. We only use 100% natural indigo dye. No chemicals or synthetic dyes added in here!
Once the yarn was dyed and left to hang in the sun, any remaining water was filtered and used to irrigate local rice crops. After the color set, the yarn was spun neatly, which you can see below left. Then the yarn was sent to our handloom weaving partners.
The now naturally dyed yarn was set up on large historic looms and woven using no electricity into beautiful fabric by skilled artisans. It took a few months for the weaving alone to be completed. The finished fabric then went to our studio in Bangalore to be cut and stitched into the garments you can now wear. It's a time consuming process that creates very special results that we are in love with. We hope you appreciate not only the final pieces but also all the skill that went into each step along the way.
Shop these naturally dyed and handloom woven pieces: here
To learn even more about our processes at Seek Collective: here