Inside our natural dye garden and labs

Did you know that nestled in the Penryn Campus orchard is a natural dye garden? The unique facility is used frequently by our Textile Design BA(Hons) students. Senior teaching technician Alice Selwood tells us more about it. 

Here at Falmouth we do loads of different natural dying. It's very student-led, so the students actually tell us what they want to learn and what they want to dye. So, we've just gone through a pokeberry dye because it's the season for harvesting that at the moment.

Sustainability is a huge element within the Fashion & Textiles Institute. We are always looking at more sustainable processes, whether it's reducing chemicals or whether it's focusing purely on natural dyes.

Dying is a really important aspect of the Textile Design BA(Hons) course. We do synthetic dying and also natural dying. So the students, from scratch, grow their plants and then they actually harvest the dyes, process them and then take them to the Dye Lab and actually produce the colors that they work with.

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