There is a hidden natural dye garden in Baltimore City.
Located at 209 McAllister Street in Central Baltimore’s Greenmount West neighborhood, as a Hidden Harvest Farm “annex”, this place became in the Spring of 2019, an experimental dye garden. Part of this garden and next to it, is Blue Light Junction, an independently run natural dye studio and alternative color lab founded by textile artist, farmer, and natural dyer Kenya Miles.
Blue Light Junction is focused on growing, processing, and preserving the history of natural dyes and their artistic, practical, and commercial applications.
As I started volunteering and working in the garden I met a wonderful community and reconnect with the power and value of plants. There’s something about the presence of plants in our lives that brightens our sometimes dismal, modern world. Much of this has to do with something intrinsic in human beings: an innate appreciation of the natural world.
It also revived my interest as a textile designer in the ancient craft of natural dye and its beauty in every step of the process, from seed to harvest, from extract to color, and its applications. And last year, Kenya and I started working on a collaborative and unique small-batch of lamps dyed with their locally grown indigo dye. These beautiful collaborative pieces combine hand-folded pattern design with press resist indigo dyed linen, to create a unique luminaire.
Shop this exclusive edition of our Misaki Pendant Lamps at our online shop.
We are also so excited to soon announce that we will have a new showroom as part of Blue Light Junction space. This new space will give us the opportunity to finally open our doors and welcome you to visit us and see in person our collections of pendant lamps, table, and wall lamps as well as our one-of-a-kind wall art pieces.
We will have our showroom doors open to the public on July, 2023. Stay tuned for our official announcement.
