Page 74 - The Digital Cloth Issue 3

So, when I discovered Canberra artist
Sally Blake’s website and her
incredible catalogue of eucalyptus
plant dyes, something just clicked.
I’m lucky to live in the Blue Mountains
surrounded by eucalyptus trees, so
dyeing fabric with eucalyptus was an

easy first project for me to try.
I started by learning everything I
could about dyeing and eco-printing
online and once I felt I had an
understanding of the process, I
experimented. No one knew what I
was doing, not even my family, and
this gave me an enormous sense of

freedom. As a writer, I was familiar
with sharing my creative work and
having it reviewed.
I’m also someone with perfectionist
tendencies. Natural dyeing
challenged that. It isn’t perfect in any
I met up with textile art at an sense. Each bundle opened is a new
interesting point in my life. I’d discovery. Sometimes it will come out
recently had major surgery after a just as you hoped, and sometimes it’ll
long period of illness and was be a complete failure, which is always

recovering at home unable to an opportunity for learning.
function at my usual breakneck
speed. I’m a sewer with a lifelong
obsession with textiles so I decided
I wanted to make something with
fabric as a way of giving my days
some structure and purpose.
Looking back, I think it was intuitive,
even if I didn’t know it at the time.

Before my illness I was a writer, but
my surgery has left me unable to
use a keyboard for more than a few
minutes at a time, and the
medication I need muddle words
in my brain. It’s been a big loss. But
something, somewhere, knew that
the way back to myself was
creativity.

Growing up near the beach in New

Zealand, I developed a strong
connection to nature from an early
age.