Healthy Materials
Goldenrod brewing in Brooklyn. Foraged from Upstate, N.Y.
Color + Nature
Hand dyed naturally. Mindful design.
We use plants, not pollutants, to create color for our accessories collection. The beauty of aligning our design, development and production with the East Coast seasons truly defines how guided we are by nature. Each season nature brings us many gifts, including the colors we create. We expand on and discover more colors from season to season through growing dye plants and natural dyeing our textiles in house.
Our dye stuffs are mostly home grown, locally foraged or food scraps. At times we also use minerals and dye stuffs that we source from trusted suppliers.
Cotton, hemp, linen, silk, wool and cork are used across the collection. All natural materials that can be recycled, composted or renewed. We source from trusted suppliers and also work with local textile recycling companies to find our materials. The products we create with industry fabric scraps helps to add another one of a kind aspect to some styles in the collection.
Coreopsis Seedlings in our Brooklyn Studio.
Dye Gardens
Plant Color. From Seed to Fabric.Seedlings start in our Brooklyn studio and then get planted in our different gardens in Brooklyn, Central New Jersey and The Jersey Shore. This has been a great study in how different plants from the same seed grow and bloom in different environments in the NY metro area and how this affects their color.
We are a family of gardeners, farmers and plant lovers. Kelocabay could not be as close to nature as we are if it weren't for the dye gardens we created in New Jersey at my family's homes along with my urban container garden in Brooklyn, NY. When I discovered natural dyeing, I realized many dye plants already grew in my Mom's gardens. She loves gardening and flowers, so now in her retirement she helps grow and tend many of the dye plants we use in our collections.
My urban gardening started back in 2002 when I first moved to Brooklyn. I started growing many different varieties of herbs and roses which led to potpourri making for holiday gifts. When natural dyeing found me while I was starting to develop my own sustainable accessory collection, it was a marriage of my greatest loves; gardening and plants alongside design and textiles.
End of season Indigo harvest in Central N.J. dye garden.