Studio notes
Not every commission needs a full wall panel, and not every Saturday bench suits a first-timer. Here is how we sort it out.
Posted 14 March · 6 min read
Most people arrive at the studio with a picture in mind and no clear idea of which format gets them there. A guesthouse owner wants "something for the wall". A stylist wants "a few pieces in that amber tone". A couple wants to spend a Saturday making something with their hands. Those are three different jobs, and they run on different timelines, materials and bench space.
The first split is between a workshop seat and a commission. A Saturday session is eight people, one dye pot, and a finished piece you carry home the same afternoon. It suits anyone who wants to learn the knotting basics or understand how a madder bath actually behaves. A commission is the opposite: we work from your measurements, dye to a specific tone, and the piece is built over weeks rather than hours. If you want a specific size for a specific wall, that is a commission. If you want to know how the cord feels in your hands, book a bench.
The second split is scale. Wall hangings and large panels are quoted per square metre, because the cord, dye and knotting time all scale with area. Small plant holders made from offcuts sit at the other end, and they exist mostly because we hate throwing away good hemp. Between those two, cushion covers and woven baskets are the practical middle ground: they take daily use, they wash, and they age into a deeper colour rather than fading out of one.
Then there is the question of colour control. Onion skin is forgiving and unpredictable in equal measure. Madder root gives a red that shifts with every wash. Indigo is the most controllable but the slowest, because each dip needs to oxidise before the next. If you need twelve identical covers for a restaurant, we dye them in one bath and pull them at staggered intervals, which gives you a family of tones rather than a matched set. That is usually what people actually want once they see the wet samples on the table.
What we ask before quoting: the wall or surface dimensions, how much light the space gets, whether the textile will be washed or dry-cleaned, and your rough deadline. That last one matters more than people expect. A three-dip indigo panel takes two weeks of waiting, and no amount of planning compresses that.
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Want to see the current dye batch in person? Get in touch and we will tell you what is on the line this week.
Naledi Fourie runs the dye pots and the knotting bench at Botanical Fibre, a small studio off Albert Road in Woodstock. She came to plant dyeing through a decade of upholstery work, where she kept running into the same problem: fabrics that looked warm in a sample book and flat once they were on a wall. Madder root, onion skin and indigo solved that for her, and she has been working with hemp, linen and cotton cord ever since.
Most weeks she is either preparing a dye bath, knotting a commission panel, or teaching eight people at a time how to hold tension in a square knot without wrecking their wrists. The notes she writes here come from those sessions, from failed batches, and from the questions clients ask before they commit to a format.