Sustainability is the key to our design, we seek to make products,
that are not only ecological, but also emotionally durable.
We love to explore
natural materials and reinterpret them in a new and exciting way.
Hi I'm Essi and I'm Rasa and together we are studio Blond & Bieber.
Today we're going to show you how to do your own,
natural dye prints from micro algae.
So, people often ask us why it's so beneficial to work with algae.
For us It's a great resource because it's 100% natural and non toxic.
That's our fabric and we're going to roll it out and cut the size that we need.
Like this, and the length.
What we need now is a textile glue to actually fix the textile
to the table.
For growing algae you don't really need a lot, you just need
a vessel, a little bit of sunlight that comes in and some water and
then they grow by themselves and the only thing that you have to
make sure is that you let some,
C02 come in, and that you also stir it every once in a while,
to make sure that the water circulates. And then the next
step would be the filtering.
For the filtering, we're using this piece of fabric.
This is actually an old screen fabric and it's very fine, so the water
goes through, but the tiny micro algae cells are staying in the fabric
We didn't invent this technique, we got inspired by Kenya.
In Africa, Kenya and at Lake Chad people are also
growing micro algae. So they have a big cotton cloth and they filter
the water through the cotton and later on they have this dried
pigment leftover. We filtered some pigment that we can use for
making a printing paste. It's important to understand that
within Europe algae are still considered as weeds but on the
other hand they have great
potentials that this resource has. The natural colour palette of
algae is made up of different species, so we actually get
really nice and very different colour tones. Maybe the most
surprising colour of algae is red, because that's a colour that you
don't associate with and we really like this colour.
It's surprising and it has a really nice effect overtime also
changing into more of a pale, maybe a little bit yellowish-red,
and this is the colour or the pigment that we're using
today for printing.
This colour is actually quite strong, so we recommend to use
some gloves and maybe also an apron and we're going to mix this
pigment with the printing paste.
So this is our pattern, for the screen print
It's actually a dot pattern and a kind of landscape,
a dynamic landscape that reminds us of the micro algae cells in
the water that are floating around. There are numerous other
printing techniques like potato stamping or linoleum printing and then stamping.
So once you have the printing paste ready you can
use various techniques with your hand and different levels of
complexity to actually create your textile.
Printing paste is ready now and we have this
really nice red colour and you have to make sure it's really
homogeneous so no little dots inside. It has to be one paste
and we're going to apply to the screen now.
Imagine, for example, you have a piece of furniture that you
don't really like anymore because its old, how about
reupholstering it with the new textile that you made yourself
with your own hands and it has a story that you actually like
about it and that makes you connect to it in a different way.
For reupholstering you need three different layers,
so you need something like a very cheap MDF plate that has the
shape of the furniture that you want to build. Then you
need some foam, this foam is like a 5cm foam that
you use underneath and then you have some fleece that comes
over everything and the textile is the last layer.
So what we're going to do first is cut our foam into the size
that we need.
The next step after cutting the foam is the fleece, which will
be added on top.
Our mission is to implement the small imperfections of
nature in craft into our design. So in the end we are
creating objects, and products that tell their own story and
have their own identity and personality in a way.
The textile industry definitely needs to change, and as
consumers we have this in our own hands. We can create objects
that are actually personal and that live longer than the
intended life cycle of the industry. As designers, we want
to create objects that people want to keep for a lifetime.