Skyler Edgecombe (Spruill Studios Intern) | August 27, 2026
The day of August 7, 2026, was splashed with color, silks, and sunshine. Folks gathered in the small kitchen space of Spruill Studios to reincarnate their old silks into extravagant art pieces.
Earlier this month, I assisted artist Karen Graffeo in leading a sun-dyeing workshop as part of my internship here at Spruill Studios. It was an event to remember, but not through memory alone — participants were able to take home their own sun-soaked creations from the workshop to commemorate their experience at Spruill Studios.
The art of sun-dyeing is a process of changing the color of natural materials using sunlight! Specific dyes are painted onto any natural fiber (including wool, cotton, or silk), and in 10 minutes or less, sunlight reacts with the dyes, producing a vibrant hue on the fabric. Once the color has developed under the sunlight to your liking, the fabric is rinsed with a solar fixative (to keep the dye from washing out) and hung up to dry.
Karen Graffeo prefers using silk for the sun-dyeing process.
“It works with any natural fiber,” she says. “It will work with cotton, but the rinsing is much harder. So that’s why we’re doing silk here to start with.”
She also explains the silk dries quicker than other natural fibers, allowing for participants’ garments to not be sopping wet upon taking home.
The leader of the workshop, Karen Graffeo, is an artist who specializes in photography but has an interest in textile art. She has an MFA in photography and painting and is known for her photography work in Cuba as well as her series “Let Us Now Praise the Roma” — a documentation of the Roma refugee camps in Europe, which has been exhibited in Paris, Italy, Romania, and New York. Karen has experience in sun-silk dyeing, inspired by Dries Van Noten, a Belgian designer that makes hand-painted clothes.
When I first met Karen, we bonded over our shared interest in textiles. This past May, I graduated from Georgia State University with a BFA in Textiles and have been interning at Spruill this summer as an assistant to art curator Shannon Morris.
In early July, Shannon and I visited Karen’s studio together. Karen was so eager to share her love of silk-dying and asked if I would collaborate with her on a sun-dying workshop. I eagerly accepted! I had never dyed silks using sunlight before and was honored to learn from such a skilled artist. Over the next month, we planned and prepared the workshop to be an immersive experience welcome to families, beginners, and people of all ages. We wanted to share a simple, fun way to create art anyone can wear!
During the workshop, Karen shared how she began her journey with dyed silks.
“I was raising a son who is a ballet dancer. I was teaching too, but I had to have something to afford his coaching and travel. So I started with the clothing.”
Karen set out to a health food store that she noticed sold lots of jewelry, but no clothes. She asked the owner if she could have her own rack of clothes to sell, to which he proclaimed that people wouldn’t buy many clothes.
“And my pitch to him was, ‘You don’t know Southern women. And if a Southern woman gets depressed, she buys a skirt first!’ And so he gave me one rack, and it went so well! It just expanded… I was selling in New Orleans, in the French Quarter, and every weekend had a booth… People started bringing me their clothes for me to do.”
Karen had many of her pieces for sale at the Spruill workshop alongside plain silks people could purchase to dye themselves.
With the right supplies, this simple dying process can be an activity brought to your own backyard! For the workshop, we used Solar Fast dyes which can be found at Blick, or on the Jacquard website, paired with the fixative Solar Fast wash for rinsing the dyes. The best part about this process is that you don’t have to wait for sunny skies; sunlight will still penetrate the dyes on a cloudy day!
“Another nice thing about these [Solar Fast dyes] is they’re safe,” Karen adds. “They’re easy to use… and it’s instant gratification.”
At around 2 pm, attendees each went home with their transformed pieces, showcasing striking colors and flamboyant brush strokes. A one-of-a-kind memorabilia for a one-of-a-kind day!
Images taken by Jenna Bertschi and Skyler Edgecombe
