Regenerative Textile Garden
Through this garden, we cultivate fibre and dye plants for natural textile crafts while maintaining the garden ecosystem through regenerative practices. The project promotes sustainable material research, community-based making, and knowledge sharing in and around Aalto campus. We asked: if creatives could see their materials growing, would they make more conscious choices?
The project was envisioned and led by textile designer and Test Site community member Johanna Hehemann, and co-founded by Brynna Justice and myself, who coordinated workshops, built cabinets and catalogs for storage, tended to the garden and actively participated in experimentation.
We hope to develop an art and design community that learns to grow, process, and create materials here, encouraging a material literacy that looks beyond globalized industrial manufacturing. The project is already in its second year, led by new coordinators and exploring new directions such as mushroom dyeing.
As part of the ChemArts basics course at Aalto University, Ina Henriksen, Suthasinee Naktnasukanjn and I made water a set of water-based crayons from food waste.
The color was extracted by the following process:
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The waste material (pulp, onion peel, coffee grounds etc) was boiled with 200 ml water in the fume hood.
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Once the water had taken on enough color, we strained out the material and let the colored solution continue to boil
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When the water had almost evaporated, we removed it from the stove and let it cool
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We then used a flat edged spoon to scrape the powdery remains at the bottom of the vessel. This was the pigment in solid form.
Not all pigments turned out the same. The beetroot and orange peels for instance, were sticky because of the high amounts of sugar, and had to be dried and powdered using a mortar and pestle. We ended up burning the beetroot the first time, which gave us a deep red-brown color, which we would end up using for one of our crayons. The best discovery for me was the onion pigment which was glittery. We joked that we should make a makeup line instead of crayons.
The crayon was made using the recipe in the children’s Chemarts cookbook, using just 3 ingredients - Methyl Cellulose (MC), chalk and pigment. We were mostly happy with the results, although the colours were still not as pigmented as we hoped they would be. However, we realized that they could be used as water colors when we dipped them in water.
We also realized that different waste materials contained different proportions of sugars and other substances, which meant that they did not give uniform results when blended with the MC and chalk. For commercial production, we would have to conduct experiments to calculate the MC : Chalk : Pigment ratios for each individual color. This could also vary across batches due to the organic and varying nature of waste materials available.
Art Supplies from Food Waste
Pepin Feedpods
It is estimated that in high income countries, about 50% of food waste is generated at the food preparation stage from inedible food components such as as eggshells and peels. Currently this waste ends up in the landfill.
Along with material scientist Trupti Arabatti and craft designer Namrata Cavale, we tried to create a bio-based packaging material for vegetable seeds which could:
I looked at how self-dispersing seeds were naturally housed to inspire form exploration. I ideated on how these natural forms could be interacted with, to open, break, hold and stack for packaging, transport, display, storage and finally, seed dispersion. Due to the manufacturing process (compression molding of the paste) the design had to be airtight while avoiding the need for adhesives, joineries or multiple components.
The production of these Feedpods require the creation of a mold. For demonstration purposes, the prototypes were hand-molded, mixing the material with 50% stoneware clay for easy sculpting.
The next steps are to test storage quality and evaluate the nutritional value imparted to the sapling, optimizing time taken for decomposition.
