Ocean Acidification

More than a dozen Mendocino County schools will be hosting a new program providing students an opportunity to learn about their ocean environment as well as a unique art experience. The students will be dyeing fabric using purple sea urchin spines.

Workshop student, Sarah Burstein of Arcata, looks at live sea urchins in salt water, during a sea urchin natural dye workshop taught by Margaret Seelie, at Fibershed Learning Center in Pt. Reyes, Saturday, July 25, 2026. (Darryl Bush/For The Press Democrat)

The workshops, presented by Seelie Studio of Oakland, include an educational component that addresses the need to harvest vast numbers of the overblown populations of purple sea urchins because they are decimating the California kelp forests.

Bay Area artist Margaret Seelie is the founder and head dyer at Seelie Studio. She was introduced to natural dye through a fun wine and crafts evening.

Margaret Seelie, founder of Seelie Studio, looks at a purple sea urchin while wearing a light pink beanie dyed with sea urchin pigment, during her sea urchin natural dye workshop at Fibershed Learning Center in Pt. Reyes, Saturday, July 25, 2026. (Darryl Bush/For The Press Democrat)

“I went to a friend’s art studio one night for this, you know, like wine and crafts thing,” she said. “A woman brought indigo dye and I indigo dyed a pillowcase and that was the beginning of the end for me. I loved it. That’s when my infatuation with plant and nature-based dyes began.”

She said she began dyeing everything she could get her hands on using the indigo plant. “That just became my medium,” she said.

Live purple sea urchins are shown in front of a jar of liquid containing sea urchin pigment as Margaret Seelie, founder of Seelie Studio, teaches a sea urchin natural dye workshop at Fibershed Learning Center in Pt. Reyes, Saturday, July 25, 2026. (Darryl Bush/For The Press Democrat)

Discovering purple urchins

In 2022, Seelie learned that sea urchins had eaten around 95% of the kelp forest off the California coast. The urchin populations are so out of control from a lack of predators that a whole movement has been created around the need to harvest as many sea urchins as possible in order to bring down their populations and give the kelp beds a chance to revive. That stuck with her and informed her path toward a unique new business that help increase the harvesting of sea urchins while also educating the public to the problems their overpopulation poses.

A chance encounter inspired that new altruistic venture. She was doing natural dyeing for Santa Cruz surfer and shaper Ashley Lloyd’s line of beachwear called Unfurling. Through Lloyd she met Noyo Harbor Master Anna Neumann who was making dye from sea urchins.

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“I met Anna and I was just totally enamored of the fact that she was doing this work and then also her as a person,” Seelie said. “She’s a total badass, she’s a fisherwoman. Growing up on boats myself, I know it’s not the most glamorous place to be at times, so I just thought she was a great grace.”

Inspired by the colors Neumann was creating, Seelie decided to see if she could figure out how to coax color from these incredible creatures. “With my background as a natural dyer and environmentalist, I used my understanding of how a shift in Ph levels can create strong bonds between dye and fabric, but also how it can disrupt and break down calcium carbonate in marine animals.”

She was trying to figure out how to get the sea urchins to experiment with when she was left a gift by the sea. She had been surfing down south and a king tide left the sand covered with sea urchins. “I filled an empty water bottle with dried spines and urchin bits and I brought them back to San Francisco and made sea urchin dye in my kitchen,” she said.

That would inevitably be the start of a new direction for Seelie. Up to this point she had been doing production natural dye work for clients on the side while working a tech job. But in January of 2023 she was caught up in a large wave of layoffs. She decided to found Seelie Studio, based on her work with urchin dye.

Spines and shells from the purple sea urchins contained in a jar are later ground into powder to form the dye, are shown as Margaret Seelie, founder of Seelie Studio, teaches a sea urchin natural dye workshop at Fibershed Learning Center in Pt. Reyes, Saturday, July 25, 2026. (Darryl Bush/For The Press Democrat)

So far, all of the sea urchins she’s been using have been from kelp restoration projects, which helps to fund those projects. She said they haven’t needed that many for their educational workshops. But now she’s working on launching the world’s first urchin dye kits which will require a lot more sea urchins. She’s currently in talks with divers and organizations to determine who she will be using for urchins going forward.

Seelie said her goal from day one was to try and create incentive for people to want urchins and the infrastructure to make them available. “So it’s a really exciting moment to finally need a lot of urchins, because there’s a lot of them,” she said.

Once Seelie receives sea urchins, she takes them to her studio in Oakland to process them.

“They go from a live animal to a purple spines,” she said.

Teaching others

For the urchin dye workshops she hosts she includes an educational component about the overpopulation of sea urchins and the decimation of the kelp forests off the California coast. Seelie said the urchins provide an opportunity for many satellite lessons that are rich with material. She said the urchin dye itself is both a chemistry and an ecology lesson because the sea urchin dye is actually a version of ocean acidification.

“So it’s really exciting because you get to see this sort of accelerated breaking down process of the calcium carbonate,” she said. “Sea urchin shells and spines are made of calcium carbonate. When you create the dye with them, the calcium carbonate breaks down and releases the color.”

Seelie said it’s very similar to what happens when ocean acidification happens. “The pH of the ocean changes due to warming and the change in the pH of the ocean creates an inhospitable environment for animals with shells, and they basically can’t grow shells that are strong and hard enough to survive,” she said. “There’s a lot of lessons around the sea urchin dye, but to me, I think that is kind of the most magical and impactful because you’re seeing this happen.”

She said she was thrilled to be approached by the Mendocino County Office of Education about offering a workshop on urchin dyeing at a retreat with 30 educators from Mendocino County schools. She said she dropped everything and told them yes. She knew from day one that the urchin dye was an incredibly powerful educational tool.

Seelie said she has a great deal of respect for educators and really enjoyed doing the workshop with them. She said there’s a really exciting moment that happens when you make the dye and the teachers’ response was delightful.

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Pilot program in school

Whale Gulch School hosted the pilot program for the school dye workshops in May. Frye helped with the classroom workshops by talking about the kelp forest ecosystem, what has led to the collapse of what had been healthy ecosystems, how that affected the kelp forests and keystone species and then led a discussion on different ways that everyone can help to mitigate these issues. They also showed the film “Sequoias of the Sea,” which tells the story of the kelp restoration projects, the loss of kelp and the impact on Mendocino’s economy.

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Seelie said the 12th graders were sort of enamored by it and were also trying to figure out what was happening. One student did figure it out and his math and science teacher told Seelie he was really proud of him. “He had identified that it was ocean acidification happening and he knew that the spines were calcium carbonate,” she said. “We had every age group in one room making the dye at the same time and it was a huge range of reactions.”

The school had partnered an older kid with a younger one so that they could help each other.

“I think that’s the kind of education that’s happening at Whale Gulch,” she said. “It’s these tiny little clever moves that educators can make and are making that creates responsibility and partnership and empathy and that was really cool to see.”

“Most of our students come from an oceanfront community and they were really excited to not only learn about positive solutions to the kelp deforestation as a result of the increasing sea urchin population, but be part of coming up with new creative solutions to a real world problem,” said Erin Gienger, a teacher at Whale Gulch School. “They proudly wear their sea urchin dyed beanie caps all the time.”

Fibershed classes

Besides working on the curriculum for the upcoming Mendocino school workshops, Seelie offers her urchin dye workshops through Fibershed as well. When we spoke she was about to teach a workshop at the Fibeshed Learning Center in Point Reyes Station.

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Margaret Seelie, founder of Seelie Studio, holds a light pink wool beanie, dyed with purple sea urchin pigment and a jar containing spines and shells used to make the pigment, as she teaches a sea urchin natural dye workshop at Fibershed Learning Center in Pt. Reyes, Saturday, July 25, 2026. (Darryl Bush/For The Press Democrat)

Janet Perry, The Press Democrat, 5 August 2026. Full article.