N A CROWDED CORNER of her downtown New York City
studio, surrounded by oversize spools of baby-soft alpaca
yarn from Peru and shelves piled with earthy fabrics,
textile artist Kiva Motnyk is showing off one of her latest
creations: a diaphanous, quilted panel stitched from scraps
of linen, cotton, and silk. It glows with a range of sunny shades
derived from goldenrod, turmeric, and other botanicals. Smack-
dab in the center is a jagged cat scratch. “My kitty got to it,” says
Motnyk with a shrug and a smile. “But I’ll probably patch over it,
and that will create a whole new dimension. I always prefer pieces
that have a story.”
Many pet owners would have banished the little creature from
the studio, but—happily for her two feline friends—Motnyk isn’t
bothered by the occasional rip or tear. In fact, her appreciation for
imperfections is one of the qualities that drew her to natural dyeing,
the process by which she infuses her fabrics with their rich colors.
“It’s always kind of an experiment,” she says of tinting textiles with
everything from onion skins and avocado pits to wild sumac, blue-
berries, pine needles, and flowers. “I can never make the same
color twice, and I love that.”
That uncertainty wouldn’t fly in the halls of Calvin Klein and
Isaac Mizrahi, where Motnyk worked after earning her degree from
the Rhode Island School of Design. She spent 15 years in the fashion
industry before establishing Thompson Street Studio (thompson
streetstudio.com), her collection of textile-driven home goods, in
- “I was disillusioned by how clothes are created now: You send
things overseas, and you don’t get to feel the materials and have
that connection,” she says of her career shift. “I really wanted to
get back to working with my hands.”
These days, she has her fingers on everything, whether she’s
stitching together quilts or pillows in her SoHo live/work space—the
same loft in which she grew up, the daughter of a painter and a
dancer—or dipping bolts of linen and swatches of washed silk into
bubbling dye vats on the 24-acre property in the Catskill Mountains
that she shares with her husband, an industrial designer. She’s
been refining her technique since childhood, when she began
making naturally dyed stuffed animals and tackling other crafty
projects with her mom. “It’s actually very simple,” says Motnyk,
who sources her palette from kitchen scraps, foraged weeds, and
her garden, where she grows marigolds, indigo, and other highly
pigmented plants. She simmers the botanicals in water before
adding fabrics that have been pretreated with a mordant, or fixa-
tive—usually a salt or vinegar solution—to help set the color. (For
a step-by-step lesson, see the following pages.)
The effects range from subtle, such as pale neutrals produced by
onion skins, to deeply dramatic. Beets deliver a shocking fuchsia.
Red cabbage produces amethyst-like purples. For Motnyk, the
process itself brings as much joy as the rainbow of results does.
“The natural ingredients smell and feel so different from chemical
dyes,” she says. “When I’m working with them, it’s hard to keep
my dog and cats away. These pigments, and the colors they produce,
are so gorgeous that everyone just wants to be around them.”
I
Kiva Motnyk (top)
stitches her quilts and
other pieces on
deeply familiar turf:
She works out of
the same NYC loft
where she grew
up, as well as in her
studio upstate (above).
But she finds inspira-
tion, discovers new-to-
her techniques, and
sources unique raw
materials when
traveling. On a recent
trip to Guatemala,
she learned traditional
backstrap weaving,
and how to dye fabric
with carrots. And she
returned from Peru with
skeins of incomparably
soft alpaca wool.
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