Beely Daily, a local fabric dyeing creative unit, used fresh fallen kapok as natural dyes on clothes in exploration of the little-known possibilities of kapok.

“染” – the Chinese character for “dyeing” – vividly illustrates the process of dyeing: the wood is boiled in hot water to extract its pigments for “nine” times until the pigments get onto the fabric. Here, “nine” is not a definite number as it means “many, many times; over and over again”.

How to dye the kapok fibres: Peel the red kapok flowers, rinse them, and put them into a stock pot, then fill with water heat up to 50-60 ºC. Kapok pigments work best in acidic environments: add white vinegar to obtain more pigments from the flowers. The colour of the flowers fades as the pigments dissolve into the vinegar-water solution and forms a pot of purple dye after simmer for 1-2 hours.

Rinse the fabric and soak it in raw soya milk for protein for 12 hours. Then hang the fabric out to dry. Soak the fabric in nutgall solution for tannin. Fabric treating 2 hours in medium temperature, soak the fabric in alum solution for 6-12 hours (the alloy is an aluminium ion). These three substances ensure better dyeing effect.

Put the fabric into the hot dyeing solution for 2 hours. Then hang the fabric out to dry. Mordant the fabric. Repeat the process until the colour turns darker.