Dym

What's Dym? Dym is a product business founded on a dream of sustainable making and long-lasting beautiful textiles. We focus on block printed fabrics, typically for interiors and accessories, contemporary prints created using ancient methods. Our custom modular blocks give us delicious flexibility in laying out patterns. Dym’s signature stripes can stop and turn on a dime, interlace, run cross wise at well-chosen intervals and grant us infinite design options…patterns that can run forever or flow and meander. We have the capability to design as we print, create new designs with immediacy, directly onto cloth. The design explorations at Dym go hand in hand with non-stop research about hows and whys of small-scale manufacturing. Committed to local production, we are always seeking more sustainable fabrics to print on and greener ways to use dye. Working the slow way, we seek to create heirloom textiles, fabrics to be used in full and maintained over a long life span. Our greater environmental goals lead us to harder questions to answer (as a business), yet we keep asking them: how to offer a mending service for the textiles while continuing to make new products? how to develop a way to easily recycle worn out or scrap natural-fiber textiles — to create beautiful and strong new ones? About Our Designs Every time we put a block to fabric, we choose exactly how to place it. With the slightest turns of hand and wrist, we generate endless differences, big and small. (To automate these gestures, so intuitive to a person, we’d need sophisticated robots and a collection of fine algorithms.) We give our human printers creative latitude so they can generate prints that are like no other. Our first line of designs, forms and shapes, starts with invention. We draw and draw and draw to find things that bear no resemblance to anything else! Each shape has its own character, and, like the traditional paisley, each form is a thing unto itself. Our second line, in writing, riffs on how forms and shapes plays like an invented language. Our in writing words repeat visually, in patterns, and as phrases that run on and on and on. Our third line, infinite stripes, showcases Dym’s love of stripes. There is no end to them! The stripes we make come from a notion that there are so very many possible stripes in the world that we may as well invite them in. How We Print (And Why!) We combine traditional, old-school block-printing methods with a fairly high tech system to plan and organize before we put block to fabric. We use a similar combination of high and low tech to make the printing blocks themselves. The whole process is persnickety and cumbersome…which leads us to take good care of our printing blocks. And it gives us even more motivation to seek pattern variations using the blocks we already have. Our model is a slow one: we aim to introduce new shapes annually or perhaps bi-annually. Inspired by the traditional shops continuing use of patterns over many years, we hope to keep our blocks in production for a long time. For more information, swatches of particular fabrics, prices, information about our mending services and more, please get in touch!