Recently, I joined dozens of other community members at an indigo dip-dye event offered by Botanical Colors with Eileen Fisher Renew. It was my first time attending this annual event, which attracts people from all over Seattle.
I’d enticed a new friend who lived in Columbia City to join me. The communal gathering allows folks to refresh old clothes that need new life breathed into them and to discover the unexpected surprises yielded through botanical dyeing. Clothing is twisted and rubber-banded, dipped and dyed to create visual patterns and decoration. And people bring everything from sweaters to socks to this somatic community-based experience.
We live in a city where a newcomer once named her social malaise the “Seattle Freeze.” Initiatives like Seattle Welcome Day are meant to grow connection between strangers to combat the epidemic of loneliness and isolation of living in a place where it’s hard to form new relationships with people outside our regular social circles. The neighborhood grocery market is no longer a place where conversations take place, if you shop at Amazon Fresh. You can purchase your postage online and print it without ever having to stand in line at a post office.
Post-pandemic, people go to lectures and performances online without leaving their homes. In getting more creative about the spaces where we want to place ourselves, we can touch back into the stream of knowing our communities through making together and making alongside one another.
Clutching my 11-year-old son’s white T-shirt that was rubber-banded around a small rock, I queued up at the back of the first dipping line. My friend Claire brought a tank top she planned on dyeing for her husband. Three volunteers staffing the dyeing vats sat behind tall plastic vessels that contained the indigo dye. For four hours, they took our garments, one by one, and immersed them in the vats until our clothing turned blue. When I got to the head of the line, I watched my son’s shirt disappear into a murky bath. After a minute, the dyer pulled the garment out and wrung it out, before handing it back to me to hang on a clothing rack for 20 minutes. In the open air, the greenish-colored dye oxidized to a deep blue.
As we got back in line to dye more items, we chatted with our neighbors. The crowd skewed toward women, but a handful of men stood in the dipping lines bearing denim pants and long-sleeved, button-down shirts. One woman we talked to came to the event every year and planned ahead by collecting garments from places like Goodwill throughout the year, which she imagined transforming through the dyeing process. This year, she brought one of her husband’s old Banana Republic shirts, which went from boring white to the look of a rich vintage denim.
Women who knew the process well shared with us their instructions on how to make a simple vinegar bath and fix the dye at home. We shared tips on how to create simple patterns like horizontal lines and circles. We complemented the creativity and intuition of others, enthusing over fabric choices and designs. One man embellished his shirt with a giant circle that covered the torso and chest pocket of what had once been a very ordinary shirt. He was delighted with himself. And that joy felt infectious.
At the end of the day, we plastic-bagged our newly dyed clothing to take home. My friend Claire asked me where I feel a sense of spaciousness in my life. The meditation cushion and running unlock that sense of space within the body. But the slowness of a day spent with a friend, amid strangers, while transforming old into new opened that sense of space within the heart and imagination.
