Six pots full of natural dye bubbled on the back patio at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau — deep red beet, yellow wolf lichen, grassy horsetail, golden turmeric, brown coffee, and blue-violet cabbage. About two dozen kids from the community labeled small skeins of merino wool with their names and used sticks to dip them in the steaming dye baths.
Lily Hope, a Tlingit weaver and fiber artist, led Saturday’s workshop. She moved quickly through the students and dye stations, adjusting a burner here, complimenting a technique there. The workshop is one of the community learning events the Alaska State Library hosts to serve the state’s cultural and natural heritage.
“I think that art is the core of who we are as human beings. Teaching children to have fun with art, keeping that enthusiasm and wonder, keeping that wonder going is key for me,” she said. “I’m also constantly looking for someone to step into my shoes.”
She said she keeps an eye out for anyone who really connects with the workshop, or has extra questions and interest.
Art, science and culture
“We’re going to go on an adventure in a minute,” Hope told the workshop. “Then we’re going to talk about this red cabbage. It’s sensitive to pH changes, to changes in acid and base.”
Hope led the kids on a foraging walk to pick horsetails, fern-like plants that are native to the region, and begin boiling them for another dye color. Back at the museum, Ellen Carrlee, a conservator there and a natural dye researcher, showed the kids how to break the bushy green stalks into smaller pieces for better color extraction when they’re boiled.
While half the class followed Carrlee into the museum to take a look at different dye specimens and create an experiment to test how quickly different natural dyes fade with sunlight, Hope got back to the pot of cabbage.
She explained how the cabbage dye changes color if an acid or a base is added to it.
“It’s a pH indicator,” one boy volunteered.
“Exactly!” she said.
The students divided the deep blue cabbage dye into three transparent buckets. They added vinegar to one, and it turned pink before their eyes. When they added baking soda to another, it turned green. Hope supplied a few more skeins of wool yarn, so they could dye them with the new colors.
While the students’ yarn soaked in the dye baths, Hope gave a mini weaving lesson. She taught them how to make tassels like those on Tlingit dancing robes, which have been woven and worn in the region for hundreds of years.
“I have to pass it on”
Hope is a weaver in the Tlingit styles of Ravenstail and Chilkat weaving, which she learned from her mother. She is one of only a few designers of dancing blankets. It was after her mother died that she fully accepted weaving and the passing of that knowledge as her life’s work.
“I love kids, and I love the sharing of knowledge — whoever the person is that wants to suck some of that up,” she said, as kids filed out of the patio dangling their tassels.
“We’re weaving history so that in 100 years, there’s a record that there were some humans here and we made some beautiful things,” she said. “It was left in my care. And I have to pass it on.”
The mood of the day was light, but in it was the thread of a bigger responsibility: that those who take on art leave something bigger than themselves behind.
• Claire Stremple is a reporter based in Juneau who got her start in public radio at KHNS in Haines, and then on the health and environment beat at KTOO in Juneau. This article originally appeared online at alaskabeacon.com. Alaska Beacon, an affiliate of States Newsroom, is an independent, nonpartisan news organization focused on connecting Alaskans to their state government.
