Storm-Dyed for Summer

Add some color to your simple hair.

Tie a hand-dyed scarf in a brilliant color around your head for a stylish summer.

Define your waist in style!

Brighten up your neutral outfit with a gorgeous, hand-dyed scarf wrapped at your wrist.

Hello, Summer!

June felt like the right moment to release a new batch of hand-dyed bandanas on the website. These are 26" x 26" cotton bandanas—large enough to wear a dozen ways, but still light, easy, and practical in hot weather. They’re the kind of piece you can knot at the neck or wrist, tie in your hair, wrap onto a bag, or keep close at hand all season.

The batch comes in four colors: Electric Green, Fuchsia, Mermaid’s Dream (Aqua), and Blueberry. I wanted the palette to feel full-on summer: saturated, bright, and a little unruly, (although the Mermaid's Dream reminds me of that sweet downtime after swimming all day and just before dinner). Each dye color moves through the fabric differently during immersion in the dye bath, and that’s part of what keeps it interesting to me.

Clockwise from top left: Electric Green, Fuchsia, Mermaid's Dream, and Blueberry. Atop each scarf is a color swatch to help show the variation in color.

I'm tyin'em up!

All of these bandanas are made in-studio using four separate wrapping techniques drawn from the Japanese Arashi Shibori tradition. Arashi is often called “storm” shibori, and that's exactly how it feels: the lines show movement like pounding rain in a powerful storm. The pattern shifts in the cloth reveal how each fabric was wrapped, bound, and dyed.

I tie each bandana by hand, although in batches to save time, which helps keep prices down. The techniques I use are ancient skills used to compress the fabric around a pole and direct the dye into the folds in only semi-predictable ways. Each pattern emerges through process, rather than by exact repetition.

Above left: two bandanas bound and compressed against a PVC tube, the "pole" I use when tying up my fabric. At right, the "lumpy" areas take on dye easily, creating a circle of color with a white border. Check out the patterns that result!

Even when I’m working within the same color families and the same binding techniques, no two pieces come out exactly alike. The variations are subtle sometimes, dramatic other times, but always part of the life of the piece. The real pleasure of hand-dyeing is that moment when I open the wrapped cloth and the pattern reveals itself. Here are two "reveals" of the Summer Collection:

Watch to see the pattern on this Fuchsia Bandana emerge!

And here's a reveal in the Blueberry colorway!

To celebrate Pride Month, these bandanas felt especially right to make and release: a rainbow palette, strong pattern, and a sense of uniqueness held in cloth. They’re small textiles, but they carry a lot—color, process, and the trace of the hand. Useful, expressive, and a little wild, they feel to me like summer made visible.

I invite you to tell me what you think of these pieces. I hope you love them!

Shop Summer Bandanas here.

-xo