how it started (pt. 1)
The start of Hello Hue Studio came about deep in the winter of 2019. I was living in a big, old, drafty house in northern Vermont and using two of its many micro-rooms as studio space (why do old New England farmhouses have so many rooms?!) and frankly, more than a little concerned about losing my toes to frostbite.
I was also woefully in the midst of a creative crisis: stuck in lull while transition my fine art practice into a more (hopefully) financially stable product-based business, but I didn’t quite know how I wanted to use natural dyes or what I wanted to make. I had tried a few things here and there, and had even spent the summer before making and selling napkins and zipper pouches that were naturally dyed with Shibori-patterns, but…I hated it. I wasn’t getting consistent results and Shibori is already complicated enough without the natural dyes and the heavy fabric I was hellbent on using.
Quite simply, I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing. Shibori is a beautiful process and has the potential to create extraordinary patterns (check out examples here, here, and here), but I wanted to spend my time a) dyeing fabric with natural dyes and b) sewing fabric, NOT intricately folding and binding fabric and babysitting the hell of out it in the dye bath.
One day I found myself in my sewing studio room, staring at a stack of fabric I had dyed solid in a range of natural dyes, banging my head against the wall and utterly paralyzed by fear. If you’ve ever spent time lovingly dyeing fabric, you understand how hard it is to cut into it, and how sad it feels to have any scrap unused (so much time spent creating that color!). So knowing I needed to leap off the precipice and just cut the damn fabric already but not having a clear idea of what I intended to make, I was only able to bring myself to cut off a 2” strip from each of a dozen colors.
Facing my new rainbow of naturally dyed denim strips and still without any idea of what I intended to make, I did the next logical things: I sewed them together.
