"Grass dyed wood" is now colorful

Like “Shen Nong tasted a hundred herbs”, with the “wonderful trial of a thousand, not a missed one” perseverance, the trials of flowers, husks, husks, and bark of leaves, Huang Ronghua finally recovered. This is a nearly lost traditional process - "grass and wood dyed," and now it is very colorful to use those plants that are not rare, can dye a section of white silk colorful scarf. Over the past few days, the "China's Intangible Cultural Heritage Production Protection Achievements Exhibition" is being held in the Beijing Agricultural Exhibition Hall. The presentation of the "Heritage and Staining" successor Huang Ronghua often makes people onlookers curious and eager to try.

Huang Ronghua used the “cloud-dyeing” technique in hand-dyed fabrics: weaving white silk, weaving, squeezing, tying up the ball, putting it into a net bag, and tying it into a Cloth ball. At the same time, we burned a pot of water on the induction cooker. Into the use of powdered mahogany, soon became a pot of "red soup", drifting out of the woody fragrance. Then, keep the temperature of 60°C, put the ball into the cloth, soak for 20 minutes, and then add alum into the water to color and fix the color. In a matter of ten minutes, the ball was removed, washed off, and unfolded. The hand was a red-and-white, silky scarf. He said that the color depth and color arrangement can all be managed. It depends on how you assemble the ball: The surface of the ball is different from the internal density, and the penetration of the dyeing solution will be different.

Then there is the color. Then cook a pot of savory “yellow soup”, which is the dyeing liquid extracted from the gardenia flower. Putting the scarlet towel into the cloth ball and putting it on again. After dyeing and fixing again, it looks like a sunset. The smashed, red and yellow scarves exuding natural aromas appeared in the thunder of people.

The audience enthusiastically divided up the remaining dye liquid. Someone had no bottle on hand and went to pick up one next to the trash.

Plants that can be used as dyes are heard everywhere by “Mr. Huang” and everyone is interested. He said that many plants that can be used everywhere can be used as "plant dyeing", such as tea leaves, gourd leaves, bamboo leaves, spring flowers, cassia seed, red yeast rice, onion skin, pomegranate skin, mangosteen shells, and longan shells. It is a fruit shell that we use as rubbish. If they are chopped and boiled into dye liquor, they can become waste.

Huang Ronghua said that the color of “grasswood dyeing” is extremely rich. The onion skin is bright yellow, the loofah leaf is dyed bean green, the pomegranate skin is dyed army green, and the black tea is dyed brown. The same plant uses white lime or alum to help. The dyeing agent is dyed on different fabrics such as silk, cotton, hemp, cashmere and the like, and the effects are different. For example, mangosteen shell can be dyed yellow, camel, army green, orange and other colors.

Such a magical "grasswood dyeing", the old ancestors have long been used. The earliest written record of this process was the Zhou Dynasty. At that time, a full-time bureaucrat in charge of printing and dyeing textiles had been set up, which was called “staining people”. During the period of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period, a variety of plant dyes have been found, and blue grass is the most commonly used. From the perspective of the word “stained”, from water, wood, and from nine, it means that dyes are extracted from plants and trees and dyed with water several times—“nine” can be interpreted as multiple times.

Before 1860, all clothes in China were dyed with plants. Yunjin, Jinjin, Songjin and all the famous embroidery were all made of natural dyes. In the Qing Dynasty, Xuexu's embroidery spectrum classified the traditional embroidery thread into nine categories of green, yellow, red, black, white, green, purple, purple, and onion, and divided into 745 colors according to the depth.

Looking for a teenager, who solved the taste?

With the influx of chemical dyes, this exotic flower is rapidly withering. The factories and workshops have all switched to cheap chemical dyes with simple dyeing procedures. Bluegrass staining is currently the only “grasswood dyeing” that has been passed down. It can be seen in Yunnan, Guizhou, Hunan and other places, but most of them are semi-natural, because chemical aids are used in the last process. Blue calico was popular in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. In recent years, there has been some signs of "recovery." However, more than 90% of them are dyed with chemical indigo. Huang Ronghua had visited the old Mr. Zhao Baorong of the old town of Tongxiang Kaiyefang. According to the old gentleman, no one used natural dyes for decades. The Nanjing Yunjin Museum restored the robes of an Emperor of the Ming Dynasty. It took two years for the dyeing to solve the problem of several dyes. It is more difficult to restore Songjin, because it has not been clear yet which natural dyes it used. In a word, the traditional "grasswood dyeing" process has almost lost.

In 1993, inspired by a dyeing and finishing expert in Taiwan, Huang Ronghua, 37 years old, embarked on the road to “soil and vegetable dyeing.” He had almost no textual information and old artists to teach him, like “Shen Nong’s taste of a hundred herbs”. In that way, I groped about it. Regarding flowers, grasses, husks, and bark of leaves, Huang Ronghua tried one by one with "a test that would rather try one wrong and one cannot be missed," trying different methods of dyeing and different fabrics. The dyeing effect, homemade color card archive. He extracted the tender yellow from the brown leaves, extracted it from the overlord flower to yellow-green, extracted from the glaucous fruit to gray, extracted orange from the mangosteen shell, extracted from the shell of the longan to the camel... many friends, netizens know His experiments, from time to time, sought him some unknown local wild plants. There are also bloggers smiling that he is "a good 'color' of the flowers." He made a poem for his own name: look for color teens, feel Huafa reminder; are talking about people crazy, who understand the taste?

Today, he has successfully developed more than 30 color systems, more than 120 colors, and more than 300 natural dyes. He initially restored the "grass and wood dyeing" process and was therefore named as the inheritor of this intangible cultural heritage. He was invited to lecture by the university and was invited to participate in the International Textile Exhibition. There was also an investor who cooperated with him and set up a textile company in Changzhou to apply the “grasswood dyeing” process.

“Because it is pure natural and handmade, our product prices are naturally more expensive, but supply exceeds supply,” Huang Ronghua said. “It is not just the concept of “intangible” that makes customers happy to pay for their wallets. Incomparable quality."

It gives you a soft, quaint, warm visual enjoyment; it is more familiar with natural fabrics like cotton, hemp, silk, cashmere, etc. It is easier to color; it is skin-friendly, skin-friendly, and gives you a natural scent to hug you...