For Edie Ure, a Boulder-based designer and natural dyer, her experimentation with natural dyes started not in the foothills of Colorado’s Front Range where she grows and gathers her materials today, but thousands of miles away, as part of her fashion studies at Central Saint Martins in London.
“We were all highly experimental,” she recounts. “We buried fabrics in the soil for six months to see how they decomposed and printed iron dust onto fabric so that it would rust. It was there that I first experimented with natural dyes, like painting stains using wine tanin, henna and mud onto a jacket for designer Koji Tatsuno.”
After school, Edie went on to work as a textile designer in New York, creating prints for the likes of Calvin Klein and Ulla Johnson, among many others. But an eventual move to Boulder brought her back to nature and all the colors, textures and lessons from it. A class on natural dyes reignited her interest, and she began experimenting once again.
“It is a very sensory experience,” she explains. “The process of extracting color from natural dye stuff is much like cooking; sometimes it involves more complex recipes and often boiling or soaking the pigment out of the dye stuff. But unlike food, we are not drawing out flavor but instead color.”
Edie says dyes can be found in all corners of the natural world: everything from insects to weeds, tree bark to flowers, seeds to fruit and vegetables. With botanical dyes, the color obtained is not only non-toxic but also more vibrant, as evidenced in Edie’s richly hued silk velvet pillows.
More recently, she’s expanded into wallpapers with enchanting floral designs made from flowers she finds, grows and arranges into intricate patterns. Her “Wildflower” wallpaper is designed from pressed flowers she collected in the foothills and has a symmetry and form reminiscent of the Art Nouveau era of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe.
For Edie, her work is “a marriage of two worlds”: textile print design and experimenting with nature.
“Everything I design or make has an environmental connection,” Edie says. “If I find a wildflower when I’m hiking, I’ll put it in a book to press it and later use it in a pattern. I collect earth from riverbeds and trails across New Mexico and Colorado to paint with or charcoal from a burn area to draw with. This makes up the whole ecosystem of my work.”
In recent years, her practice has grown even deeper roots. At the beginning of 2020, Edie began gardening, growing both her own food and dye plants. In the last two years she has filled her backyard with harvests of Japanese indigo, the leaves of which she then processes into indigo pigment.
“Growing a garden for food and dye plants has been a real joy and a good measure of time, witnessing the transformations that seasons bring and working on nature’s schedule,” Edie says. “Digging in the soil, weeding and watering has provided comfort and a good understanding of my place in the world.”
When others bring her creations into their homes, it’s a chance to share that comfort and connection.
“I want to reconnect people to the natural world through their senses by putting nature in the center,” she says. “Using the natural colors of earth, flowers and indigo in the home, alongside other natural resources like wood, stone, marble and even metals, makes for a happy balance of materials and a calm home.”
Find Edie’s pillows on her website, edieure.com, and at Sacred Thistle in Denver and Hygge Life in Eagle-Vail. All wallpapers are available through Denver showroom Walltawk (walltawk.com) or on edieure.com.
