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.