The Focus: Sun Dyeing & Slow Cooking Color

Throughout the month of June, I’ll be using two deeply meditative Indigenous Geechee Gullah dye methods: Sun Dyeing in Glass Jars and Slow Cooking Dyes in Crockpots. JOIN ME! These methods are more authentic to how Momma Mary (Mary Burnette) in Georgetown and Grand Mere on Johns Island, SC, practiced natural dyeing. My momma’s mother, Mis’ Minnie, (Minnie Haskins), who came up with using a crockpot. She first used it to make soap, and then, when my momma needed matching silk scarves for one of her societies, we started dyeing in a crockpot as well. 

Sun Dyeing in Mason Jars

Reflecting back, glass jars can become tiny worlds of transformation when you add silk or wool and a natural dye. It’s amazing to watch. Plant material, water, cloth, and sunlight work together slowly over days. The outcome is layered, unexpected color. Indigo leaves, marigolds, onion skins, hibiscus, blackberries, oak leaves, berries, flowers, roots, and garden plants become living pigments suspended in light.

Each jar becomes part science experiment, part memory vessel, part prayer. It’s how I remember being in Georgetown and on Johns Island. As a child, I felt like I was transported to another world. Colors were streaming through jars filled with suspended shapes on land where I could smell the ancestors. That too-sweet smell of The Blues after a rain in a lush green world with moss dripping down everywhere like watermelon juice on a hot June day.

Slow Cooking Dyes in Crockpots

A crockpot lets me go slow and steady. Slow heat allows natural colors to deepen gently into silk and wool fibers. I’m creating a range of colors on wool to applique on freedom cloth medicine shawls. I can create samples before I commit to yardage. I’ll also dye silk scarves to sell. I’m inspired by my family’s traditional kitchen-based dye methods. My book, Indigo As Medicine: Living The Blues, Healing Through Cloth, is being told through our ways of doing.  By practicing Indigenous and Geechee Gullah traditions of transforming everyday domestic space into a living studio. Natural dyeing happens slowly. Colors bloom gradually. The process asks us to pay attention. No industrial rush. No synthetic shortcuts. Just heat, time, plants, minerals, cloth, and care.