More from Arrowmont 2009

Some pics from the finished work from Arrowmont 2009. The yellow is actually an acid dye but the other colors are from natural dyes--persimmon, cutch, cochineal, madder with an iron mordant to darken them. The peach and pink scarf is madder (the peachy) and cochineal (the pink). The peach and pink scarf had a spot where some of the rice paste resist smeared a little. That led to an interesting conversation with our instructor about handmade vs. machine made. Does this tiny glitch make it less valuable or more because it has the mark of the human hand? In Japan, our instructor told us, some of the artisans who actually make perfect work will deliberately make a tiny error in an inconspicuous spot to show that it is handmade and not machine printed.

Arrowmont continued

Now back to Arrowmont! We ran into some hurdles with the weather mid-week. Several heavy rainstorms pushed us back to working inside instead of outdoors as originally planned. We then had problems getting things to dry so we could keep putting new coats of dye on. With the natural dyes, the dyes are painted on in many layers allowing them and the rice paste to dry between each layer. If you don't let it dry, the rice paste can start to break down and you will lose the crispness of the edges or dye can seep under. Also, the natural dyes need to set into the cloth and then be ready to receive more dye. I wish I had taken more photos of each step, but you get so caught up in the process and with talking to the other artists that it is easy to forget. I hope to try katazome with my students this year and will have to document better as we go through the process.

whew!

Back from Arrowmont, did not get anything posted those last days as they were so intense battling humidity trying to get things dry! Lots of aiming of fans and hair dryers on our work. The great part is that we had a wonderful group of people and all were kind about sharing and helping each other out. I hope to get more pics posted from the end of my Arrowmont adventure in the next few days as well as start on finding some sources for supplies for katazome to list in my links. A little out-patient surgery will keep me in bed for a day or two so I should have some time to spend on my laptop at last!

ARROWMONT!

Well now, we are here at Arrowmont and very busy getting started working on our projects. I am seeing that my blog does not look right on the computers here, so that means it does not look right on other peoples computers. More learning curve on doing custom backgrounds for the blog--but that will have to wait until I get back from Tennessee.

Last night we made our first batch of rice paste, and went over a lot of great information. Our instructor Rowland Ricketts is awesome.

Today we are gathering plants to use for our dye baths and learning to use a cone to apply the rice paste in a technique called tsutsugaki. Tomorrow we are going to learn how to make stencils in the traditional style.

Back to work!