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.