While studying for a master’s degree in architecture at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Aleksandra “Sasha” Azbel discovered a new love: textiles. She was intrigued by the textile department’s lab, which seemed like a cross between kitchen and witchery. Then, in 2013, while Azbel was studying abroad in Oaxaca, Mexico, she watched local people make richly colored dyes from plants. The idea that such dyes and the clothes made from them could express a love of the places and ecosystems we occupy inspired her. It felt sustainable and respectful – an antidote to fast fashion and the textile industry’s negative ecological impacts.
Azbel’s fascination with textiles, her love of the ocean and the forests, and her longstanding interest in art inspired her to create a sustainable, locally sourced textile art and design company in 2021 – and to co-found a Forest to Fashion workshop with the goal of bringing people from diverse backgrounds together and changing how participants experience clothing – and the woods.
As a child, Azbel had struggled to feel a sense of home and community when her family immigrated to Texas from Kazakhstan in 1997. That changed in Providence, where she immediately connected with new friends, the place, and its rocky coast. After graduating from RISD, Azbel stayed in Providence and began working as an architect.
Inspired by what she learned about plant dyes in Oaxaca, she began dabbling in creating her own dyes. Azbel bought craft-store indigo dye kits and delved in to sewing classes, books, and blogs. She collected seaweed and sumac and taught herself to make the first of what she calls her “beloved stains.” By 2018, Azbel wanted dye making and fabric art to become more than a hobby. She stopped practicing architecture in 2019 and was granted a Fulbright Scholarship to study dye making in Sri Lanka starting in February 2020, but the pandemic forced an early return to Providence. The following year, she founded her company, Sashoonya (Azbel’s family nickname), and agreed to lead a Forest to Fashion workshop in conjunction with a local land trust.
Creating Sashoonya
With Sashoonya, Azbel creates silk, linen, cotton, and hemp seaweed-imprinted textiles: scarves and bandanas, framed works for hanging, and multi-panel installations. She sells her wares in person, via her website, and at Frying Pan Gallery in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. She has moved beyond DIY dyeing kits to cultivating her own indigo and marigold. Every four to eight weeks, Azbel forages for seaweed by the ocean at low tide, starting with a prayer of gratitude to the earth. She also gathers oak bark, acorns, and other forest ingredients during weekly hikes in summer and early fall. “You collect enough stuff so that you’re hoarding like a little squirrel, but you have things through the winter months,” she said.
Sumac and oak, including acorns and bark, comprise about 20 percent of her dyeing ingredients. Oak’s light tan dye becomes silvery gray when Azbel adds iron. Sumac leaves create a yellow dye that she favors as an underlay; the plant’s berries make a rosy pink dye. The indigo Azbel grows accounts for 30 to 40 percent of her dye ingredients. She uses marigolds for their bright yellow hue and boils onion skins for a softer yellow, while avocado pits create a peachy pink dye. She tweaks the shades with varying quantities of calcium or iron.
The Sashoonya studio, in a converted file factory site in Providence, is Azbel’s own witchery kitchen. This past April, she and studio assistant Clara Rooney tested different dye combinations for a commissioned ecoprint tablecloth. As leaves, flowers, and acorns boiled in large pots on a portable two-burner stove, each plant released a particular aroma. When Rooney scooped marigold into what looked like a supersized metal tea infuser and dunked it into one pot of boiling water, a scent like a sweetly floral tea permeated the air.
The duo pulled two rolls – one about a foot long, the other closer to 4 feet – from a homemade steamer, fashioned from the end of an unused sewer pipe and a wallpaper steamer. The pipe is sealed on one end, with a lid on the other. Thick pieces of wood hold the fabric rolls in place, preventing them from blocking the steam and keeping them safe from the water that pools in the curve of the pipe.
Each roll of fabric requires at least four hours in the steamer for the seaweed to imprint its image. Before steaming an eco-print, Azbel prepares the fabric – in this case silk and cotton – in a process called mordanting. This involves soaking the fabric with a substance such as alum to help the dyes stay vivid. Then, she soaks the fabric in soy milk, dries it, and leaves it in a box to cure, which improves color absorption, vibrance, and durability. Curing time varies from project to project.
When she’s ready to design, Azbel re-wets the fabric and lays it on a sheet of upcycled plastic. She meticulously places seaweed, flowers, or other plant material on her fabric canvas. She folds the plastic over the ecoprint, then rolls the whole thing around a cylinder made from chicken wire. Azbel wraps this cylinder in strips of torn bed linens, then places it into her makeshift steamer.
In the studio this past spring, Azbel and Rooney pulled the two rolls from the steamer and placed them on a worktable. “You’re going to get a whiff of the ocean, of low tide,” Azbel said as Rooney unwound the cloth from each cylinder. Inside the smaller roll was a long silk panel bedecked with moist seaweed. The larger roll contained five 12-inch cotton squares, each treated with different mordanting recipes; they were a test for the commissioned tablecloth. As Azbel and Rooney gently tugged strands of seaweed from the unrolled squares – as one might peel a scab from skin – the plant’s ethereal shadows, which stretched and curled like abstract roadways, remained.
Inspiring Artisans and Advocates
In 2019, when Paul A. Roselli, president of Rhode Island’s Burrillville Land Trust (BLT), first heard Azbel speak about making dyes from foraged plants and creating fabric art with the colors, he thought, I’ve got to get this person to the land trust. Established in 2000, BLT is a private nonprofit that preserves some 300 acres of woods in northwestern Rhode Island. Roselli wanted people to experience the place through Azbel’s work. He envisioned a workshop led by Azbel, focused on foraging, dye making, and fabric art. “I want to do a fashion show in the woods,” he later told her. Intrigued, Azbel said yes.
Azbel had never taught a workshop, but a fashion show in the woods reflected her values, and it felt antithetical to the competitive and exclusive fashion world. Instead, it would be “celebratory and joyful and community based,” Azbel said, and about “connecting to nature and then translating that into fashion of some sort.”
Roselli’s goal was simple. “At the end of all this, I wanted advocates,” he said, for people to have a positive experience creating, hiking together over streams, and sharing his scratch-made vegan meals. If participants ever had the chance to advocate or vote for forest conservation, he hoped “they would err on the side of advocating in a positive way.”
Azbel felt that her own knowledge wouldn’t provide enough context for a two-day workshop in the forest. She invited Dinalyn Spears and Hope Leeson to fill in the gaps. Spears, who is director of community planning and natural resources department for the Narragansett Indian Tribe, leads the workshop’s native plant walk, detailing how the Narragansett have used plants as food, medicine, and technology – building materials, vessels, or other tools. During the workshop, she describes how to make “the first lemonade” from sumac. She points out birch, red maple, and tulip trees, and notes blackberry, blueberry, and red raspberry bushes.
Leeson, a field botanist and lecturer at RISD, focuses on plants’ scents, tastes, and dye-making properties. “I just try to engage people with the plants themselves as sensory entities,” she said. She invites people to chew black or yellow birch twigs and to taste checkerberry. She talks about moss, white pine, and mushrooms. She notes that the checkerberry leaves and fruit they’re eating – plus mugwort and yellow and paper birch bark – make nice dyes. Her walk, Leeson said, awakens people to “the individual plants, rather than just a whole backdrop of plants.”
With the two experts in place, Azbel and Roselli designed a two-day workshop that begins in the woods of BLT. The land trust sets tables and an open-sided tent in a clearing. Roselli brings a propane stove for cooking. Azbel brings various cuts of hemp-linen fabric, her own stove, and other materials participants will use to create their own dyes and fabric designs.
The workshop opens with a morning yoga session, then Spears says a blessing and Leeson leads everyone on her walk. After lunch, with participants’ foraged plants assembled on a table, Leeson quizzes them on what they’ve found. Then, it’s time to experiment. Each participant gets one or two 5-by-5-inch linen-hemp fabric squares and a glass jar. They put foraged plants in the jar with boiling water, then add their fabric swatches. “People can make their own little recipe,” Azbel said. Participants label the jars with a Sharpie and blue painter’s tape, and Azbel packs them away to steep overnight.
From there, participants gather around a 32-gallon plastic bucket. Those who have brought homemade goldenrod dye – Azbel provides instructions before the workshop – compare hues before pouring the liquid into the bucket, creating a communal dye bath. Two at a time, they gently lower 1½-yard-long strips of fabric into the bath, where it, too, will steep until the following day.
When participants return for the second day, they gather under a pavilion in the center of Burrillville. After a morning stretch and a brief orientation, Azbel demonstrates ecoprinting. “It’s like a cooking show,” she said, with everything set up ahead of time, including a completed steamed print ready to unroll. With Azbel’s work as inspiration, participants design their own ecoprints, decorating fresh swaths of fabric with the previous day’s forest foragings. They roll the cloths around wooden dowels and place them together in a giant aluminum pot atop an upside-down, 3-inch-deep vegetable steamer. Below, a few inches of water will boil for hours, mimicking Azbel’s studio steamer.
Next, participants remove their fabric from the communal goldenrod dye bath and hang it on a clothesline in the pavilion, creating a row of yellow. Spears leads the group on her walk, then they have lunch and mingle, a time that allows everyone to get to know each other. After lunch, they open the previous day’s glass sample jars and hang the swatches to dry. Azbel talks about the hues and sought-after colors from natural dyes and shares what she’s learned about the history of dyeing in other cultures and locations. The workshop ends with “the big reveal,” when everyone unrolls their ecoprints. “It’s like Christmas morning,” Azbel said. “You don’t know what you’re going to get.”
Participants leave with everything they’ve created and are invited to a sewing circle two weeks later. There, they can make aprons, skirts, or other garments with their dyed and printed fabrics. A few weeks after that, they gather again for a fashion show under the pavilion.
While Azbel and Roselli said the first workshop, in 2021, was a success, they wanted the second, in 2023, to include people from urban Providence who don’t spend much time in nature because of geographic or economic constraints. Azbel increased outreach in her city, while Roselli arranged for stipends so people could miss work and travel to Burrillville, which is about 40 minutes from Providence. The second workshop included a mix of local and Providence-based participants.
Azbel and her partners continue to work toward providing a more diverse and accessible workshop. A key part of that has been hiring one Providence-based participant of the 2023 event as a diversity, equity, and inclusion director who “understand [participants’] needs and what they’re going through in a way that Paul and I cannot,” Azbel said. A third workshop is planned for this September.
Today, the workshop fulfills one part of Azbel’s professional vision. Rather than practicing architecture, she now teaches the subject at Roger Williams College. And with Sashoonya, Azbel wants to expand into home goods such as couch cushions, so that people can have the “good qualities” of plants and natural dyes in their homes. She is seeking the line between a financially viable business and creating textile art that is “constantly evolving and is becoming more beautiful and more rich.”
One thing is for sure: Azbel’s partnership with Roselli and Burrillville Land Trust is deeply grounded in the values that prompt her to pray before foraging and to source her ingredients as sustainably as possible. These are values she and her partners hope to spread in the Ocean State through their workshops and outreach. “I think if people are interested in learning more and getting back into the natural world,” Spears said of the workshop, “this could be the start.”