BOTANICAL FUROSHIKI HUGGED BREAD WORKSHOP
A Sensory Journey Through Colour, Craft, and Nourishment 🌿🍞✨

Immerse yourself in the beauty of natural dyeing and the art of bread making in this unique, two-part workshop. Together with Alexandra Mitsiou, we invite you to slow down and connect with nature’s elements—transforming plants into vibrant furoshiki wraps and simple ingredients into nourishing botanical bread. Through ancient techniques and mindful craftsmanship, we’ll celebrate the harmony between textiles, food, and tradition. Leave with a beautifully dyed fabric, a freshly baked loaf, and a deeper appreciation for the rituals that sustain us.

PART ONE: Bundle Dyeing & Furoshiki Making Workshop hosted by Christiana Vardakou

In this hand-on workshop we will create our own bundle dyed linen furoshiki. By working with locally available dye materials: chamomile flowers, walnut leaves and husks (that you will also be using in the bread-making process) we will draw a direct connection between nature, craft and the bread making process we will share with Alexandra.

I will also bring a selection of dried dye materials, including peonies, marigolds, madder roots, and hibiscus, allowing you to experiment further with nature’s palette. Bundle dyeing is a contemporary, intuitive and experimental natural dyeing technique and a deeply rooted practice that celebrates the unpredictability and beauty of natural colours. Using fresh and dried flowers, leaves, roots, and even kitchen waste, we will create intricate botanical prints on fabric through steaming. Each piece becomes a visual story of the plants used, their seasonal availability, and the alchemy of heat, moisture, and time.

We will also dive into the Japanese tradition of Furoshiki - beautifully dyed cloths used for wrapping and carrying objects. Dating back to the Edo period (1603), this thoughtful practice embodies sustainability, care, and intention. By replacing disposable wrapping with reusable, hand-dyed fabric, we embrace a more conscious approach to gift giving, food storage, and everyday rituals.

At the end of the workshop, we will wrap out freshly baked bread in our naturally dyed furoshiki, blending three ancestral crafts into a single, nourishing gesture - one that feeds both the body and the soul. You will leave with not only a loaf of handmade bread but also a beautifully hand-dyed piece of fabric that can be used again and again.

This workshop is an invitation to slow down, connect with natural materials and rediscover the beauty of simple, mindful practices.

PART TWO: Bread Making Workshop hosted by Alexandra Mitsiou

During this workshop we will learn in a step by step easy process how to make a botanical bread with walnuts and chamomile. The leavening medium will be the baker's yeast that allows us shorter times of fermentation compared to baking with wild fermentation.
Chamomile and walnuts will be the overlapping elements with the bundle dyeing creating an interwoven link between the two processes.

We will learn about the wheat, the science and biology of the bread. We will connect to the flour, the water, the salt, the yeast and we will hand-craft our breads in a journey across the senses. We will use ingredients that are local and some can be foraged seasonally in nature at the land where we currently are and we will learn to recreate this bread back home and introduce it to our daily nourishment. By doing so we are adopting a more conscious eating lifestyle and we are choosing for an elevated quality of nourishment for our bodies and spirit.

This bread making workshop goes beyond a typical cooking workshop, it invites us to go deeper to meet the spaces within us that require attention, nourishment, reconnection to the natural and to the Earth, to our sensory awakening and to the essence of our nourishment. 

The four elements that are present in the process of bread making, the earth, the water, the air, the fire, are reminding us of our own essence and are grounding us into the essence of our everyday life.

The dough becomes a healing medium and a vessel to help us journey deeper within ourselves, our intuition and the information and memory of food existing within our DNA.
This workshop invites us to reconnect together in circle while creating one of the most ancestral foods through a slow and conscious journey. We are called to learn, recreate and keep alive the ancestral method of bread making that is connecting us with our past and our ancestors.