By Rada Kaneva
Eleonora Edreva, or Ele, as her friends call her, is a Fulbright Student Researcher whose project explores the intersection of organic awareness and traditional crafts through natural dyeing. With Bulgarian roots and a deep passion for textiles, Ele set out to learn from artisans across the country, only to discover that many traditional dyeing techniques have nearly disappeared. Instead, she found herself experimenting, researching, and reviving these lost methods—transforming her project into both an artistic and ethnographic journey. Through hands-on work with natural dyes, workshops in Sofia, and creative storytelling, she hopes to bridge past and present, bringing new life to ancient craft traditions. We sat down with her to learn more about her discoveries, challenges, and inspirations.
Q: What first sparked your fascination with natural dyeing?
A: In March 2020, when the pandemic began and a lot of people were getting into baking, I was ordering wildcrafting and foraging books—all I wanted to do was spend time around the spring plants starting to emerge. When the books arrived, I was giddy to take them to the forest preserve and search for things like violets, ramps, and mayapples.
When it comes to textiles, my undergraduate thesis was a fashion capsule collection of survivalist textiles I made by hand, from mostly petroleum-based materials. After undergrad, I’d started to become more mindful of the types of materials I used and also grown curious about textile traditions, having inherited two family textiles that were handwoven by my great-great-grandmother.
I did my master’s degree in a program focusing on biocentric understanding at the University of New Mexico, which is highly unique in that it brings together artists from different disciplines who share an interest and commitment to using their artwork to explore the interrelationships between natural and cultural systems. I had admired natural dyeing from afar for several years, but it was there that I realized natural dyes are a key intersection point between plants and textiles, two of my biggest interests and inspirations.
In grad school, I took a weaving class and fell in love with the art form. New Mexico is a place with very deep and vibrant textile traditions from both its Native peoples and the Hispanic settlers that have lived there for hundreds of years. Finding abundant information about the local natural dye plants around me, I began experimenting with dyeing yarn in my textile practice. Being Bulgarian, I grew curious to learn about my own ancestral natural dye plants and traditions. I did what most people who newly arrive at a niche interest do: I started doing online research. When it became clear that there was no Bulgarian natural dye information in English and next-to-nothing in Bulgarian, I started to feel the threads of these interests connect. The idea to propose this project arrived almost immediately and so did my interest in potentially playing a part in reviving and re-popularizing this craft in Bulgaria.
Q: Natural dyeing is both an art and a science—blending creativity with deep biocentric knowledge. Do you see yourself more as an artist, a researcher, or something in between?
A: This is a great question – I definitely see myself as something in between or maybe even outside of those categorizations. I’ve tended to have a hard time describing myself fully as an artist because my work is quite interdisciplinary and many parts of my artistic practice are immaterial (such as writing, social practice, etc) rather than leading to the production of material objects. In a world that’s very drawn to the immediacy of the visual, it’s sometimes hard to describe my art to people who just want to see images that don’t need any context. However, “researcher” on its own doesn’t fit quite right either, because the results of my research are more creative than the typical academic writing one thinks of when they hear “research.”
Recently, I’ve taken to referring to myself as a storyteller – I find this is a title that represents the fluidity I experience when deciding which methods to follow my creative interests with and which can hold space for the many forms their results end up taking.
Q: You originally hoped to learn directly from artisans, but you discovered that few still practice these techniques. How did that change your approach, and what did you learn from experimenting on your own?
A: Unfortunately, I learned within the first few weeks of being here that pretty much nowhere in Bulgaria have natural dye traditions remained intact. Though I’ve met a handful of people around the country who have begun to work with natural dyes, they’ve almost all come to the interest on their own and have been doing their own experimentations rather than learning from a teacher. The exception is in the case of a couple weavers and natural dye enthusiasts from Chiprovtsi, who learned from Mr. Nikola Nikolov, a chemist and schoolteacher in Chiprovtsi who is probably the foremost expert in Bulgarian natural dyeing. However, his depth of knowledge also came through his own experimentation and research rather than through learning solely from a lineage of artisans.
There’s a lot of expertise required in natural dyeing – small shifts in timing, temperature, and even the specifics of where and when the plants were gathered have impacts on the colors produced and on how long-lasting they are. All of this knowledge comes with lots of experimentation and time. This is where the true loss of severed traditions is felt – all of the knowledge that has been accumulated and passed down over centuries is gone, and each contemporary practitioner is rebuilding this knowledge from scratch.
In the absence of natural dyeing mentors, I’ve been doing my own experimentation and have definitely come to a few exciting and surprising results. I’m also thinking about ways to connect the natural dye enthusiasts and practitioners I’ve met here through some kind of network, so we can at least be learning from each other rather than each person having to independently reinvent the wheel, so to speak.
And on the level of my research, this shift in method also expanded the scope of my interest in the project. Rather than just focusing on natural dye plants and traditions more narrowly, natural dyes became only the center of a wider web: mythology and folklore around colors and plants, the status of “tradition” in general in contemporary Bulgarian society, the economics around traditional crafts, and so on.
Q: Is there a particular plant or dyeing method that has fascinated you the most? What makes it special?
A: The plant I’ve been most fascinated by so far has been madder (Rubia tinctorum), the only Bulgarian plant source for red dye. Red is an important and prized color in many cultures around the world, including here, which perhaps stems at least in part from the fact that obtaining a true red natural dye can be difficult.
The part of the madder plant that holds the dye compounds is the roots. I’ve always been really drawn to working with plant roots – I feel more of a sense of mystery when digging in the ground to harvest something, and I also appreciate the sense of responsibility that working with roots asks of you. When you take the roots, you’re killing the plant. In general when harvesting plants, you want to be extremely mindful of the health of the plant community, and this sense is only heightened in the case of roots. The material takes on a more precious quality when you bring awareness to this fact, which ultimately sharpens the reality that you really want to use the plant material in the best way possible considering this exchange.
Q: Your project involves reviving a nearly lost craft. What has it felt like to take on this role of preservation and reinvention?
A: I love that the wording of this question combines preservation and reinvention. I think these two domains have to go hand in hand in order for a traditional craft to thrive – it can’t stay stagnant. I feel extremely grateful and honored to become a link in the long chain of people who hold this knowledge, and my greatest hope is that I can inspire more Bulgarians to become interested in natural dyeing.
Q: Your work isn’t just about research—it’s also about creating. How have you balanced the two throughout this process?
A: Doing research as an artist is exciting because there isn’t such a strong division or sequence between research and creating. It’s more of a holistic process, seeing everything in the world around me as potential material rather than just being limited to certain types of (often written) sources. I’ve really enjoyed collecting visual inspiration by looking at and documenting the colors, shapes, and symbols around me during my field research as well as around Sofia. My favorite moments are when I’m able to make connections between the things I’m seeing and experiencing and the things I’m reading about. For example, I’ve been riding on a lot of buses around the country traveling for my research and got inspired by the way highway interchanges look on Google Maps – they form a little symbol that looks almost like a motif you’d find in a weaving. I started drawing these symbols and making patterns out of them, and these sketches took on more meaning once I started reading more on Bulgarian mythology and folklore and finding that “crossroads” are an important symbolic place in folk magic.
Q: Why do you think traditional crafts like natural dyeing still matter today? What can they teach us in a world of mass production and synthetic materials?
A: There’s so much to say on this topic! As many people know, the textile industry is a huge polluter. The manufacturing of synthetic dyes, specifically, has had an absolutely devastating effect on many waterways and aquatic ecosystems around the world. In light of this, it’s no surprise that so many people are turning back towards natural dyes.
It’s true that working with traditional ways of making and dyeing textiles is much more time-intensive, which is at odds with the mindset we’ve all been indoctrinated into where fast and cheap are our top societal values. But unfortunately, everything comes with some sort of price, and we’re living in a time where the prices of our fast and cheap mindset are becoming harder and harder to ignore. I think that natural dyeing can teach us a lot about the importance of mindful production and consumption, and can remind us that we live in a world of natural limits where growth and production can’t be infinite.
And that’s only on the practical level. On a more humanistic level, I believe that reconnecting with natural color has a lot of benefits to offer us psychologically, whether that’s through the therapeutic benefits of spending more time in nature, the color therapy of local plant-based palettes, or the idea of living more seasonally. I also believe that being surrounded by only machine-made fabrics, synthetic colors, and industrial foods sensorily trains us to value and expect homogeneity – that everything should look, taste, feel, and smell exactly the same every time. Whereas working with plants and handmade processes teaches us to see and appreciate the beauty of difference and nuance. Rather than thinking about pink as the one-note color that comes out of a tube, working with natural dyes teaches us that there’s dozens of rich, beautiful hues of pink, or yellow, or any other color. This kind of psychological shaping can then influence the other ways we experience and think about the world – do we want to continue prizing simplicity and sameness, or do we want to cultivate a mindset of seeking out and valuing complexity and nuance?
Q: Since you have Bulgarian roots, has this journey helped you connect with your heritage in a new way?
A: I was born in Bulgaria and moved to the U.S. when I was only four years old, and my lifelong sense of living culturally and emotionally between two places has deeply shaped me. My parents have always worked hard to make sure that my sisters and I remained connected to our Bulgarian heritage – we spoke Bulgarian at home, ate Bulgarian food, celebrated Bulgarian holidays; but, of course, this is different from living somewhere and being fully immersed in place and culture.
As someone who really loves plants and the beyond-human world, my major personal desire for this time in Bulgaria was getting more familiar with the country’s many landscapes and ecosystems. It’s been really important to me to connect to a sense of my heritage – to experience the incredible land here and learn about the ways my ancestors have been in relationship to it. Though things like culture and history can be read about from a distance, I believe this type of knowledge can only be gained through embodied connection, through getting to know a place over time.
Q: If you could create a natural dye palette that represents Bulgaria—its landscapes, culture, and history—what colors would be in it and why?
A: This is such a wonderful question! I thought a lot about this and realized that I don’t yet feel ready to answer it. Natural dyes really ask you to get more comfortable with seasonality, to be present to the sensory and energetic shifts of the seasons. So far I’ve only been here through fall and winter, and I think my understanding of Bulgaria and its natural dye palette will only continue to blossom with the colors and moods of spring and summer. I’ll get back to you!