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.

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!