Cut and Color

Out of the deep

2012-01-25T16:56:00.000-08:00

Hi all, I am back in the land of the living and more to the point, in the land of the creating, after knee replacement. The final months before the surgery and the recuperation kept me out of the studio but I am on a tear now and eager to resume sharing my art life and knowledge with you all again. I have a Facebook page now and will be posting there as well.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Nautilus-Fiberarts/219386980331

I cut some stencils this week for an interesting big quilt top. Years ago I made stencils of the big shells of fossil ammonites, extinct relatives of octopus and Chambered Nautilus. These shells are truly gorgeous things and the stencils have been useful for a series of quilts I called Strata.

My art quilt group High Fiber Diet is planning a travelling show called Elements, and our pieces are to be based on earth, air, fire and water. I decided to expand on the Strata theme and work through several geological eras, during the period when invertebrates (as opposed to fish) dominated ancient seas. (For those of you who do not know, my first career was in marine biology and I worked on octopus, as well as some of its relatives, and I have always been crazy about the beauty and diversity of invertebrate animals.

So the new stencils depict some really ancient arthropods called trilobites, some clam-like animals called brachiopods and some crinoids and urchins, relatives of starfish, as well as other shelled creatures that might be found as fossils. I have the big quilt top pasted and ready to dye, although it might be awhile before I finish it, as I have other things in the queue ahead of it.

These are the trilobite stencils. Aren’t they interesting?

Sizing things up

2010-06-17T05:27:00.000-07:00

Today started in the far NW corner of Nebraska, two days out from my first class in Madison. It was a nice state park, with nice lawns and trees. One of the things I have to do before a class is stretch and size the fabric for the students to use. This involves painting two four-yard lengths of washed silk and linen with soy milk and stretching it to dry. I showed you how the Japanese do this with narrow fabric. But with 45-60” wide fabric this is another story. Same principle, just a much larger motor activity.

It was not raining and we thought it would be OK to do it first thing in the morning before we left the campsite. Certainly a much better place for that project than the trailer parks we had been in earlier on the trip. At home this would be fine because mornings are usually calm and the breeze does not pick up until late afternoon. But this is Nebraska and pioneer women went insane because the wind never stopped. It was a little like painting a cross between a sail and a bucking bronco. So I stood there holding my morning tea in one hand and anchoring the fabric with the other so it did not sail off and become a UFO. It twice revealed the structural weakness in my stretching system, but at least it dried fast .

return to Kuriyama kobo

2010-06-08T21:13:00.000-07:00

I woke Monday to pouring rain and I bravely set off to take two buses to the kobo (workshop) where I was to spend several wonderful days observing and photographing. We had been there in November 2008 on an afternoon tour and there are pictures on the blog archives of that trip. I will just share some details. I have a new respect for the meticulous care they take to produce perfect fabric in every part of the process. Stencils were cared for meticulously as well. Here is Mr. Ohno, the current owner, mending loose pieces on a stencil. They get used hard. But I know from my own experience that a little time spent repairing a stencil saves a lot of time re-cutting it later.

They keep color photocopies of previous fabrics in all the various colorways.

I loved watching this worker applying funori (a kind of seaweed, rather like the sodium alginate we use) and a small amount of soymilk to prepare the fabric for dyeing with acid or direct dyes. The many shinshi make a wonderful clatter as he works the brush back and forth.

They have a place for everything and everything in its place. Many brushes hang on the wall ready for use and look at all the special sizes of shinshi!

The kobo is located up a narrow stream that flows down into the Kamo river in the middle of Kyoto. A source of fresh water is important for dyeing but the workshops that once polluted the rivers were relocated. The cherry blossoms that overhung the stream were lovely and the water was used to remove paste and purify brushes too.

They were working on summer obis so much of the fabric they were using was hemp, imported from China. I got a kick out of Mr Ohno patiently rolling out long lengths from many rolls at once, trotting back and forth the length of the long work table.

The long stationary table is used for wider fabric like parasol parts.

Most fabrics for obi or kimono are attached to heavy long boards which are held on racks and stored in slots at ceiling height. You have to duck to stand up in the room where the pasting is done. The worker thus does not have to lift the long boards any higher than absolutely necessary.

The youngest worker was a young woman who said she had graduated from art school last year. She did the most tedious work, like washing shinshi to prevent dye transfer and applying cover paste to protect dyed details from over dyes. She spent a lot of time delicately popping what were to me invisible bubbles in this very sticky paste, and then sprinkling it with fine sawdust to reduce the stickiness.

I thought at first that they were cutting corners by dyeing only the parts of the obi that would belong on the front and the knot in back, but apparently this is traditional for nagoya obis, whether dyed or woven. They put an inert pigment in their paste, coloring it blue. I can see that this would make pasting and matching patterns more accurate, especially because they apply two or three layers of paste through thin stencils. And as far as that goes it might make applying dyes more accurate too, but it would take some getting used to from a color standpoint.

The dye kitchen was small and as far as I could determine that work was done only by the son-in-law and heir apparent.

They use open flame burners of various kinds to help the dyes dry more quickly, and humidifiers, to keep the dyes from drying too fast. I am sure the labor safety folks in the US would be horrified at the singed seat cover on the dyer' chair!

The final step after dyeing is to send the fabric out to be steamed to set the dyes, and then it returns to be washed. Sometimes additional dyes are added then and kakishibu is sometimes used to mute and blend the colors.

It then goes back for specialized finishing and steaming to size. They took me to see all that the third day I was there, but it will have to wait for the next post.

Tomorrow we leave on a three month teaching vacation so the next posts will happen when we get internet connections.

the flavor lingers

2010-06-04T07:33:00.000-07:00

I arrived home to a MAJOR computer crisis, so you will all have to forgive me for taking so long to put pictures up from my adventure in Japan. This first post will not be textile related, but will give you a taste of delicious Kyoto at cherry blossom season. The day I arrived I was too wiped to take pictures except of the view from my window of the huge trees in the grounds of the Imperial Palace across the street.

The next morning was a sunny day and the palace was open to the public, something that happens rarely, so I braved the crowds and wandered over to view the cherry blossoms and take the tour. Sharing a picnic under the cherry trees is a favorite Kyoto tradition.

And crowds there were! Most folks were dressed casually. I saw a few kimonos and a lot of creative clothing combinations among the young girls in the crowd. Black leggings or tights and dainty net skirts seemed to be big.

The gardens are extensive, mostly trees, but there were some more intimate corners as well.

In the afternoon I went downtown to catch an exhibit of contemporary katazome and recapture the flavor of the place. The exhibit just blew me away. It deserves a post of its own and I promise I will do one later.

Kyoto itself, for those who have never been there, was undamaged in the war and lots of the old wooden houses with their latticed fronts still exist. Most people are familiar with them. I found this contemporary remodel interesting.

High fashion exists here as in any big city, and kimonos seem often to be rented for special occasions. This was the rental place down the street from the hotel.

saving the best for last

2010-04-22T16:56:00.000-07:00

This has been a busy week. Betsy Sterling Benjamin, who is the tour leader, worked in Kyoto as a batik artist for many years and has amazing contacts.

We began the first day with visits to the yuzen dyeing museum, the Nishijin weaving center and the well known indigo shop Aizen Kobo. These were all places I had visited the first time I was in Kyoto by myself and I will save descriptions for a later post when I can put up pictures.

The next two days we visited four totally amazing batik artists, in Japanese the term is rozome. The first one fed us what was supposed to be a light lunch but it was totally gorgeous. These visits will be better shown with puictures too.

The fourth day we went to a factory that weaves absolutely enormous theater curtains on the largest loom in the world, as well as tapestries and obis and the finest and most delicate weaving done with fingernails. Then we visited the Kyoto Seika University, an independent art school, and got to meet some students and faculty. The textile department would fill any American student of textiles with joy. Huge, well equipped and comprehensive. Wow.

We finished the day with a visit to a mountain hot spring resort, an onsen, for a soak in an outdoor heated pool with a relaxing view of the mountainside. We had dinner there and returned down the mountain by train.

We had a day off for sightseeing and visiting the temple market on Wednesday.

Yesterday we woke to pouring rain and caught the high speed train to Nagoya for a visit to Arimatsu, the world famous center for shibori. Ed and I had visited there as tourists but this trip was an entirely different animal. We were met by Mr. Takeda, the owner of the laargest shibori company and a descendent of the founder of the craft here four hundred years ago. We visited the shibori museum and then walked to see the factory of a contemporary shibori artist.　He makes fabrics for Issey Miyake, curtains for Tiffany, and other marvels. We had lunch and then trecked along the Tokkaido to see the home and business of Mr. Takeda. This Edo era mansion is a wonder itself but he took us back to seek a display of modern kimonos and another of indigo dyed kimonos, some more than a hundred years old that I have seen pictured in books. He offered us tea in a tea house that 230 years ago was host to shoguns and daimyos. Shopping and the train trip home finished the day.

I can hardly wait to show you pictures.

The avant garde

2010-04-15T23:58:00.000-07:00

Saw a couple of modern exhibits today with two of the tour group who arrived early. Some lovely and interesting work and an installation of old bluejeans and jeans ads by Glen Kaufman, an American art bigwig, that did little for me. You rent the space for exhibits here so I guess you can put up whatever you want. He was an interesting man to meet actually, but the politics of contemporary art installations is often lost on me. Time to rest up for the tour tomorrow. I will keep you posted.

Life just gets better

2010-04-14T15:06:00.000-07:00

The second day Mr Ohno invited an old friend, a retired art school professor and katazome expert, to stop by and use his better English to answer my more technical questions. That was actually a big help. I was especially curious about their resist paste (nori). They do not make it there but buy it from the nori shop, and then color it quite blue with aobana, a non reactive pigment. It is somewhat startling looking frankly, but it makes for hugely accurate paste application. Especially because, and this blew me away, they apply three layers of paste! The fabric is always attached to a long board or table so nothing can shift or distort and even the tiniest paste dots register perfectly. I have resisted this method, but for some things I can begin to see its usefulness. And the point is that the tiniest flaw is cause for the kimono seller to reject the entire bolt, so there is absolutely no room for error.

In the course of the discussion both men gave me much needed reasurance that my own artistic path is a valid one and that as long as I am making pieces that hang , where the hand of the cloth is not an issue, as it must be in their kimono tradition, pigment dyes are serving me well and there is no reason to switch over to synthetic dyes unless I want to.

Yesterday they took me to see the steaming and finishing operations and to visit another long board dyer. Then we went to peek into the nori factory. That was an eye opener. Kimono dyeing they tell me is failing in Kyoto, but based on the amount of paste ingredients and buckets of paste I saw there certainly did not look like any kind of decline. Evidently every dyer has paste made according to his specific recipes.

Home last night to another wonderful hot bath. Now I will be a tourist for a couple of days until the tour begins.

Back to the kobo at last

2010-04-14T05:05:00.000-07:00

My hotel is on the west side of the Imperial Palace and this morning dawned cold but sunny enough to show me the sunrise for the first time since I arrived. I have had my directions upside down since I arrived for some funny reason so it was a relief to get my inner navigator straightened out. The cherry blossoms are still in evidence because the weather haas been cool although the peak is probably past.The steady downpour all day Monday did not help, but it did not dampen my spirits much. I was just having too much fun!

The workshop where I spent the last three days is called Kuryama Kobo (kobo means workshop). It is owned by a Mr. Ohno, who worked his way up to succeed the founder. He has a daughter who works in the kobo and his son-in-law, Mr. Nishida is the senior dyer. There is some evidence of little grandsons so the family succession in the business may be assured. The place is located up a narrow valley on the outskirts of Kyoto, along a stream, with overhanging cherry trees. A pretty place certainly, but a necessary location for a dyer because they rinse their fabric in water pumped from the stream. Originally the streams and rivers of Kyoto were terribly polluted from the dyeing industry and laws required them to relocate. The property includes houses for both couples.

I was given complete freedom to explore and photograph as long as I did not ask so many questions of the workers that they lost time from their work. I understand the process so a lot of questions were not necessary. It was the details that interested me most. They were working primarily on orders for summer obi. Interestingly, and it took awhile to figure this out, they were only painting the details on those portions of the obi that would show on the front and the knot at the back. This was a cost cutting measure for the purchaser, since most of the obi is hidden inside anyway.

The young staff was pleasant, helpful and interested in making my stay productive. I shared a bento lunch with them in their lunchroom. Good lunch too, and only 400 yen (about $4.25), a steal.

I have now edited this post. The lobby computers unexpectedly shift into Japanese or even more inscrutably duplicate whole phrases. It times out with about 30 seconds notice so I was lucky to finish my sentence!

2010-04-11T02:59:00.000-07:00

I visited the katazome exhibit I told you about yesterday and was left paralyzed with delight. The artist, a woman professor at a Kyoto art school artist, a woman professor at a Kyoto art school does katazome, but that is where the similarity ends. Her work is monumental in size, richly detailed and textural and lushly colored. Her inspiration for many years has been the sights and textures of Viet Nam. There was a video presentation that showed her technique and it was amazing. For those of you who know a little about katazome, it was a real departure from what I do. She uses synthetic stencil paper in very large sheets, without any silk mesh reinforcement, even when the lines were quite detailed. My suspision is that the strength of the synthetic paper makes that possible. She draws the detailed cartoon on the paper and edits as she cuts. The fabric is stretched tightly in a frame the size of the stencil and the paste she used seemed to be made mostly from the sticky rice flour, with less of the rice bran I use to keep the paste from sticking too hard to the fabric. The workshop where I am going tomorrow uses similar paste to cover painted portions of the design before painting the background. The dyes are acid dyes which must be steamed into the fabric and are much more penetrating than my pigments so probably the paste must be tougher. Anyway, this running on does nothing to explain the beauty of her work. You will just have to wait until I get home so I can show you pictures.

The rest of the day I did normal sightseing. I am amazed at the creativity of the Japanese, young and old, in combining wardrobe pieces . The results range from elegant to frankly odd but it is clear they are not just slopping through life without thinking about what they are wearing. We could probably stand to imitate that a little in the US. Actually the New Yorkers do a little better than the Corvallis-ites in that regard so maybe it is a big city thing, but the Japanese have such a history of paying attention to costume that they really take it to a new level.

2010-04-10T15:57:00.000-07:00

I am here! Safely installed in a hotel across from the grounds of the Imperial Palace. Since I start my dyers workshop experience tomorrow I have a lot to do and see today. Not the least being the cherry blossoms around town. I made a hasty trip yesterday the visit Tanaka, the store where I buy the fabric for my noren, and restocked. Thank goodness they will ship the eight bolts home seamail so I do not have to carry them home in my luggage. I did buy a gorgeous book on bingata, the process I will be studying while I am here. It was heavy, but I wanted to savor it in my room in the evenings so I kept it. I also bought some precut stencils, not something I normally indulge in. Curiously the newly cut synthetic stencils cost more than twice as much as the older traditional stencils which were much more finely cut. They are more fragile of course, but very lovely and I will enjoy using them. Kira Benjamin,who will conduct the tour at the end of the week tells me there is a gorgeous katazome exhibit going on so I will make a point of visiting there today. More later.....

2010-04-05T15:52:00.000-07:00

I am back in the land of the living with a healthy back and a fresh new life to live. I am resuming my blog after much too long a gap in posts. Sometimes life just comes first.

The big adventure coming up soon is my departure for Japan. I will return to spend a week in the dyer's workshop in Kyoto that I visited in November 2008, and stay on for a tour conducted by Betsy Sterling Benjamin, who worked in the kimono industry in Kyoto for many years and knows places that the average tourist never goes. Since I will be traveling without a computer I will need to rely on the hotel's system so I doubt I will be able to share pictures until I return, but I will keep a journal going.

Before I go, however, I want to share some pictures taken at my most recent class at the Newport Visual Arts Center. One of my students kindly shared pictures she took. Frankly I am always so busy teaching and making sure people have a successful experience I do not have time to document a class, so this was a treat for me. The wonderful classroom was literally right over the ocean on a gloriously sunny weekend and we all had a complete blast.

For a two day class like this one I generally bring quite a few of my own stencils to use so people can paste fabric while their own stencils are getting cut and ready to use. These are large family crest patterns that work well for a class. The students start their cutting with simple fan patterns. But occasionally one takes off and designs her own stencils, as Dawn did here.

Once the stencils are cut we attach a layer of silk mesh with latex enamel and start making the resist paste for the afternoon's work. The rice paste resist is easy to mix and steams for about an hour.

Here are a couple of pictures of paste drying, again using my stencils.

I always begin the second day with lots of examples, both of my work and other samples, as a way of giving people inspiration about how to proceed once we mix up our dyes.

The pigment dyes we use are made of freshly prepared soy milk and powdered watercolor pigments. There are lots of other dyes that can be used but these are both traditional and easy to use.

One of my good Japanese brushes.

I pasted one example of a repeat pattern to show how a longer piece could be done and stretched indoors.

Here are some pieces drying in the sun. See what I meant about the great location!

At the end of the day we use Colorhue dyes to make silk scarves using the students own stencils. It strikes so quickly that the resist paste stays on the fabric beautifully and the results are practically instantaneous.

The dyes need a few days to cure so nobody in the class got to see the finished work. The remaining pictures, sometimes before and after removing the paste, are images shared by my students.

China Grass

2009-08-18T22:10:00.001-07:00

This will be the last post for a little while, as I recover from back surgery, but I wanted to share something I have been thinking about. I bought a piece of fabric not too long ago, for a summer jacket. It has a traditional scrolling vine pattern, but not at all in traditional colors!

This almost quintessentially Japanese pattern is so commonplace that it seems almost trite, but the variety is still enormous. The name is karakusa, which is translated China grass. It has been around since the 7th century when the first patterns arrived from China, but the origins are much older than that, the arabesque designs that came to China via the Silk Road from Persia.
Several years ago I made a coat for a June Colburn challenge in Houston, with the theme of Along the Silk Road. I spent months researching the history of the Silk Road and the treasures at the old capital of Nara still housed there that came over with the first cultural exchange from China and parts further west. This was before I had my basement dye studio so I had to paste large garment fabric on my dining room table. I dyed the large areas stretched outside but I painted the details inside. I tied up the dining room for weeks. I had such fun designing the stencils to reflect all the different design elements that had their origins in various far-flung parts of the Silk Road routes. I masked off areas and pasted the overall arabesque, then added detail stencils in the voids. The lining was a more traditional Japanese karakusa pattern with large imaginary flowers with clematis centers.

That is one of the things I enjoy most about these designs. You see lots of different flowers, frequently cherry or plum blossoms, even chrysanthemums, which are a very stiff upright flower, but in the karakusa convention the Japanese designers manage to make the stems as sinuous as any vine.

Most often they are seen in indigo and are as common for everyday bedding as ticking stripes are for us, although much more beautiful. I have collected many and cut quite a few. Check my website nautilus-fiberarts.com and see how many you can count!

But they do show up in kimono patterns also. Here are two, one dyed in traditional blue on silk and one beautifully dyed bingata style on a haori coat I bought at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. I had no business doing that, but the dyeing was so seductively lovely I just could not resist.

Keep your eyes out, karakusa shows up quite often in ready to wear, and bold details become quite graphic on pillows.

Rainy Season

2009-06-21T13:25:00.000-07:00

This is the time of year in Japan when the hydrangeas bloom, the cool, wet precursor to hot humid summer days to come. Hydrangeas, ajisai in Japanese, are one of the commonest floral images for kimono in early summer, because of their cool beauty. Curiously, however, they are almost the only flower not used for family crests. Because they change color during bloom they are associated with inconstancy, not a good attribute for a noble family. The first significant sale I made, more than ten years ago now, was an art quilt with hydrangeas titled ”Inconstancy in Bloom”.

I made it using appliqué of paper pieced silks on a katazome background of graded color. It had borders of pieced yukata cotton with a hydrangea pattern, and silk dyed with a delicate pattern of hydrangeas and butterflies. I priced it so high that I thought it would not sell and I could continue to enjoy it myself for a little while, but lo and behold it sold to a collector in Florida. I missed it for awhile because I had planned to hang it in my studio, but it was certainly good for my ego as a beginning quilter. The border is the same stencil pattern (RP13) that I use for indigos, but it is lovely in colors. Here it is as a pillow top.

I have revisited hydrangeas several times for stencils. This one I use primarily for garment fabrics for my wrap coat pattern. I made it in delicate blues on white once, but I do not have a picture of it.

Here is another, PP 19, that is new to the indigo inventory. I have not used it for garments yet but the positive negative aspects are intriguing.

The motif of the rainy season has appeared twice since in small art quilts. This one sold at the Japanese Garden a few years ago. I have another piece of this fabric left to make a second quilt. I have a notion to appliqué part of an umbrella in the foreground.

This one was made using a heavy paper stencil to apply soy wax and acid dyes in a class at Coupeville with Betsy Sterling Benjamin.

The last hydrangea stencil is quite large and I am finding it interesting with kakishibu, the persimmon dye used to laminate stencil paper, among many other uses. This is a single panel I am getting ready for Kobo in Seattle.

Fish Tales

2009-05-12T21:04:00.000-07:00

I treated myself to some relaxation time cutting stencils after the big show went up. I am supposed to be getting ready for a trunk show at the close of my Portland exhibit, but stencil cutting is one of the best ways I know to unwind. The images I was using were Asian vegetables and fish, from a Japanese clip art source. The vegetables I recognized mostly, but the fish were so specific that I got out my good Japanese cookbook, organized by ingredient, and when that was not enough I walked over to the OSU bookstore for a fish book so I could look them up. Here is one of the stencils I cut. This is a sea bream, a lovely red rockfish that is evidently as tasty as it is beautiful, and it shows up occasionally in Japanese textiles. I am looking forward to using it and painting the lovely red color. The other six fish in the series are not so brightly colored.

The convention of naturalistic images began during the Edo period, when scientific observation developed. I have a piece of antique silk with wonderful images of sea life, so detailed that I could easily identify porgy, tuna, flounder, and eel plus octopus, clam, and crab. I bought it in a shop in Tokyo particularly for the octopus since that was "my" animal during my research career, but now I am finding the fish fascinating.

Can you imagine wearing a delicate silk crepe summer kimono with this fierce looking porgy on it?

The flying koi banners you see are called koi nobori, carp banners. I was fortunate to be in Japan once during Boy's Day and got to see them for myself. Usually what one sees are carp (koi). Carp can be rather aggressive in the wild and Chinese legend has it that they can swim upward through a waterfall. Therefore they represent striving against adversity, a manly attribute. For this reason there are many textiles and banners for boy's day that depict carp. This is one that I bought several years ago.

I also have a stencil, one of the most intricate I ever cut, that shows carp ascending a waterfall. Susanna Kuo's book Carved Paper, has a similar stencil on the cover. I think I realized I had "arrived" as a stencil cutter when I found I could cut at that level of detail.

More often on women's kimono one sees the more languid and decorative ornamental koi we associate with Japanese gardens. I have a stencil I use for indigo but it is much more interesting when I paint it with my pigment dyes. This fabric panel is very impressionistic. The resist paste defines the image clearly, but I like the way the loose application of color seems to break up the image like moving water.

My own fish art these days is mostly salmon and trout. As an invertebrate zoologist I tended to overlook fish in favor of the bright colors of the tide pool animals I love. When I got to really looking at trout I discovered what flashy little creatures they really are. The three small quilts I did for the most recent show depict Dolly Varden, and Brook Trout with their delicate colored spots and rich red spawning Coho.

Showtime

2009-05-04T15:04:00.000-07:00

Here it is, May already. I did not think it was possible to work as hard as I have done for the last two months. My husband had emergency surgery right after my last post and once that was over I have spent every spare moment getting ready for a wonderful exhibit at the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center in Portland, followed by the biggest show of my textile career. The invitation came from our local historical society museum, not, one would think, the most exciting of venues. (It is located at 1101 Main St., Philomath, OR and is open 10-4:30 Tue-Sat until June 13. bentoncountymuseum.org).

The gallery is in an old college building with an auditorium that is used for well known biennial quilt exhibits and other art displays. It is not usual to be invited for a solo show there so it was quite an honor and it cost me nothing. It is a wonderful large room, high ceilings, good lighting and there is a curator to help hang the show, paint the walls, send out press releases etc., and plan the reception. It would be nice if the show were in the Portland area so more folks could see it, but a good many friends are driving down so I am content.

I went in two months ago and got a plan of the space. Once I got my Portland show pieces completed and hung I looked at my remaining inventory. I really had to get busy. I finished nine quilts and five noren in six weeks (with the help of Linda Alexander, my wonderful machine quilting expert, for three of them.) There are twenty-two quilts, including three bed-sized ones, and ten noren, the asa door curtains I like making so much.

The opening was last Friday. It is a busy time of year and there had been openings the two previous days, so it was not crowded, but I had one potential student who came all the way from Michigan to visit her daughter and they came. One art patron friend told me it was the prettiest show he had ever seen in that space; it just made the room sing. That made me happy. The word is getting around about it and people are admitting they forgot or had some life-complication. Such is life. I moped around about it for awhile on Saturday and then took myself by the collar and told myself to just grow up and get over it.

This is the auditorium space with the three big quilts.

The long fish quilts had sold before the show opened. One we borrowed back for the exhibit and the second will be delivered to the Del Thomas Contemporary Quilt Collection after the show closes. I did finish three little ones in time for the show. I will talk about them, and fish in general, in my next post. The green piece at the end is the most experimental piece I have ever done.

It is called "Jellies" and was inspired by the look of the water in Puget Sound. It could be green marble based on the way it looks from the top deck of a ferry boat, but then the sight of a huge transparent jellyfish reminds you the water is transparent also. It has a sheer overlay. I machine stitched bubbles on the overlay to give it some texture but the quilt underneath is hand quilted and stretched on a frame. It moves delicately with the slightest breath of air and it really looks like water. The jellyfish stencils were almost the first I ever cut when I was designing my own stencils and the top was finished years ago. It has been put away for a long time because I could not figure out how to hang it. Nothing like a deadline and a blank wall to get you moving on a stalled project. We went to Home Depot and prowled up and down the hardware aisles until we finally found the little hooks designed to support the middle of a cafe curtain rod. They were perfect for supporting the dowel far enough away from the face of the frame and easy to screw into the wall.

The opposite wall was home for two pieces inspired by the night sky in the Willamette Valley. The long one is a six panel noren, actually a triptych of three two-panel noren. In order to paint the long background I sewed the panels of ramie together with a zig-zag stitch using invisible nylon thread. Then I stretched it, painted the sky and foreground, applied the stencils and resist paste for the trees and painted them. (It worked fine, but I had an awful time removing the stitching. When they say invisible they are not kidding.) The small trees were added with silkscreens made from photographs of other trees. We often see circular clusters of the native white oak trees growing around where the trunk of an older tree used to be. I have been told they are left from when the local native people burned the valley. The quilt on the right has a field of red clover in the foreground.

The last pictures are of the stage area with other noren and one of the nice perks of a museum show, a video kiosk to play my Art Beat video. I was really grateful for the opportunity to explain my process and share tools, stencils and some history with the viewers.

Modernity

2009-02-20T13:20:00.000-08:00

Sorry to be so slow about this post. The last post was two days before I got quite ill and I am just now beginning to resume my life again.

I have a wonderful book called "Fashioning the Kimono: Dress and modernity in early twentieth century Japan" It was published in conjunction with an exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is lavishly illustrated and a joy to own. In it there are pictures of quite a number of kimono made with a weaving technique called meisen. These were inexpensive fashion garments in the 20s through the 40s or so, bought by young women for wearing on the town for social occasions, not formal, and worn for only a year or two until the newest fashion supplanted it. For this reason they seem to have survived and show up now in flea markets in quite good condition. (Check out www.ichiroya.com for a source of wonderful Japanese textiles.) I have bought as many as I could afford. At first I thought I would take them apart for reuse, but I could not bear to do it after the first two or three because they were just so beautiful.

The weaving technique is fascinating. The pattern is applied to warp or weft threads, or sometimes both, by partially weaving the fabric to stabilize the threads, then using stencils to apply dye before reweaving them. This makes an ikat type edge, just imprecise enough to be interesting. The designs are WONDERFUL - lively, influenced by the art deco and later designs of their day, and although they still use the usual floral motifs etc. they are much less staid than traditional kimono patterns for more formal wear.

Last week I took them to a local textile group to illustrate a talk and at the end of the evening there were enough for everybody in the room to try one on. We had a blast!

I thought you might like to see some of the designs close up. I am tempted to make digital prints of some of these to print onto silk and actually use them that way instead of taking them apart to use just a tidbit.

The Three Friends of Winter

2008-12-29T18:50:00.000-08:00

Well, with New Year's Day upon us today I put up the banner I made to celebrate the New Year Japanese-style. The New Year celebration in Japan is a really big deal, complete housecleaning and lots of traditional decorations, visits, gifts etc. Many of these contain what are called "shochikubai" the trio of pine, bamboo and plum blossom. The literal translation is "the three friends of winter". The notion originated, as many of these things do, in China. The convention is that pine and bamboo stay green throughout the winter and plum blossoms open while it is still winter also. You see these three grouped together over and over in Japanese textiles and the variety is endless.

Here is the banner I made. The stencil is quite large and comes from a family crest design. I used it on a big indigo noren but have no room for it so this more delicate one hangs in my entry awaiting a proper tassel on the bottom.

I found a set of postcards in Japan that were done by my favorite katazome artist of all time. I cannot read his name but I have seen his work in books and calendars before. This little Kyoto scene depicts a multi panel noren with the same trio of images. I adore the delicacy of his shading.

The variety of ways of depicting bamboo are fairly predictable and plum blossoms too (always five rounded petals with a starry center, and often budded branches), but when it comes to pines the sky is the limit. Here is a set of small examples:

While pine trees may be depicted fairly realistically as in the image on the upper left, often they become so stylized, as on the lower right that they are hardly recognizable as pine trees. I have several stencils like this that I use for indigo. Pine bark is often depicted with a series of jagged diamond shapes, frequently filled with other images (see upper right). Pine needles are pretty done as radiating sprays as in lower left, but you often see the needles scattered by themselves. Japanese pine needles always come two to a bundle so they have come to represent long marriages. (They can be almost infinitesimally tiny when used on kimonos for old married ladies, who traditionally wore increasingly small patterns and muted colors as they aged.)

I have an antique stencil that I used to make an indigo piece, ( so when I travel to teach I will have a less fragile example for my students). See how the plum blossom shapes have been used to contain other more detailed members of the trio.

The final piece I will share is one of the first quilts I ever made. It takes the form of a Buddhist monks robe, a kesa. It is pieced in sashed columns in a pattern known as rice paddy. The more columns, the more important the monk. The Buddha wore rags, but the monks robes, although pieced to represent rags , were often made of really sumptuous fabrics. Some of the first complex cloth I made was much too pretty to cut up so I used every scrap to make this quilt. The elements are pine branches, with bamboo in the sashing and plum blossoms for the square pieces in center and corners. Hence it had to be called "The Three Friends Kesa".

2008-12-19T14:56:00.000-08:00

I have been looking out the window at the recent snow, a rarity in our part of Oregon. The camellias in our Japanese garden are very old Camellia japonica, which grows quite large and is native to Japan. The leaves hold a lot of this wet snow. They bloom very early when the weather is still very cold. It always amazes me that any blossom so big and exotic could get its act together in winter.

The Japanese use camellias often in fabric design, most often the single variety, which has a clump of stiffly upright pistils in the center of the blossom. I have been cutting a small stencil to make a New Year’s card (I will never make it in time for Christmas cards), and later a fabric panel to frame and sell in these lean times. This stencil does not have the silk attached yet.

I thought you might enjoy seeing some of the huge variety of forms that the camellia takes in the work of the former owner of the Kyoto workshop I visited. He seemed to have a particular fondness for this simple blossom. The first image is a kimono with a definite springtime feel. The remaining are fabric details, ranging from stylized to realistic. I particularly like the last two, both with snow, but so very different from each other.

Creche

2008-12-19T14:21:00.000-08:00

My apprentice has been busy the past few weeks finishing a lot of routine pasting, in preparation for several batches of indigo dyeing, once I get the vat up. I do all the dyeing myself because it takes so long for each batch to dry, and there is a kind of rhythm to it that is hard to teach. Once she was done I went back to work on some commissioned pieces. Yesterday I pasted four sets of the little crèche kit that I designed almost ten years ago, when I was just beginning katazome. Two are for custom orders and two will be packaged up for sale.

Long before that I had purchased two darling Japanese folk toys in the shop of Koji Wada in Berkeley. They were printed fabric animals, stuffed with rice hulls. One was a bird, and the other a mother monkey, holding her baby. I treasured those little guys. There is a long story about her, and the birth of my daughter many years ago. Here is the monkey.

Anyway I did not really know how they were made, but they were simple shapes, and I got the bright idea to design a set of crèche figures with katazome stencils. I used PFD pimatex and dilute but thickened Setacolor transparent textile paints. Usually I do not like to work with my watercolors on cotton because they tend to bleed, but this tightly woven cotton worked out OK, and it is stable enough to sew and turn with small seam allowances. This is the finished crèche. My small daughter loved it and it was safe to play with. I still get it out every year.

In my post from Takayama, I mentioned finding these folk toys. It turns out they are wood block printed. They make a set of darling zodiac animals, of which my mama monkey is one, and quite a lot of birds, plus a handful of fish. I bought a flock of the little birds for the Christmas tree. Here are a couple. I managed to translate the names of some of them and some remain mysterious. The cute bird with the crabs on his tummy is called “water loving bird” (the direct translation of the kanji).

Asa

2008-12-02T17:10:00.000-08:00

Well we are home from our Japan adventure, finished with housecleaning and Thanksgiving and starting to feel like ourselves again. I thought I might talk a little about asa, which is the more or less generic term the Japanese use for bast fiber fabrics. First a little technical information.

Bast fibers are a family of vegetable fibers which run the length of the plant stem in the layer between the outer bark and the woody core. Botanists refer to this as the phloem. Jute, flax, hemp, ramie, rattan and banana fiber are all examples of bast fibers. They are stiffer than cotton and in some ways more brittle. They are also harder to prepare, requiring composting or extensive soaking in water to remove the pectin that binds the fibers together. Jute, used for burlap and rope, is a coarse tropical fiber. The commonest of these for most of us is linen, made from flax, and hemp, which was used widely in Japan for clothing in the days before cotton was imported and grown.

In Okinawa, where the dyeing process called Bingata originated, ramie and banana fiber were used, especially for summer kimono because they could breathe and they were stiff enough not to cling to the body in hot weather. This fabric is exquisitely fine and almost transparent. Ramie is made from a kind of perennial nettle (yipes). It is not grown here, partly because it is hard to degum and separate into strands. I have used ramie for a number of years for the noren I make. It is crisper than the linen we usem so it hangs in a doorway or on a wall without getting limp or wrinkled. I order the fabric by the bolt in several narrow widths from a dyers supply place in Kyoto. It comes in two forms, a softer white and a stiffer natural, and several weights. Here is a noren that I particularly love. The mountain is Mt Rainier, although I now have a stencil for Mt Hood in this size, and smaller stencils for all the Cascade peaks.

Asa takes the pigments and natural dyes I use for Bingata beautifully. This panel is one that sold in Japan, dyed with kakishibu, fermented persimmon juice. The image is the greatly enlarged bottom of a Ponderosa pine cone.

This is a group of small handbags, dyed with natural dyes, that I found in a department store in Kyoto. Aren't the colors wonderful?

The Bingata workshop in Kyoto that I visited uses Direct dyes, a synthetic dye with a particular affinity for cellulosic fibers. I have used them for nassen, where dye is mixed in the paste, a subject for another post. In addition to the fabulous book the owner of the factory also gave me bundle of Chinese hemp ends to use for small dyeing projects. I shipped them home by sea mail so it will be awhile before I see them.

I had been told by my colleague Chris Conrad that there was a business called Aoni near Kyoto that specialized in asa, so on one of our sightseeing days we went down there on the train. This is what we found, the mother lode of lovely asa in every type and width, ready to dye.

In order to save room in the suitcase I had them ship these purchases too, but I have a sample card and price list for future use. I was really delighted to find a weight and width that would be ideal for place mats, since my usual 14" bolts for noren are just a little too wide.

Takayama and Shibori

2008-11-16T03:57:00.000-08:00

We spent two days in the mountain town of Takayama. It is a charming place, touristy of course, but authentic. I suppose it has about 50,000 people, the size of Corvallis, but they have spring and fall planting and harvest festivals with huge ancient floats and 300,000 people show up. Fall color was just magnificent. I discovered to my delight that the wood block printed, stuffed fabric folk toys I have been looking for all over Japan are made there. This is the garden of the ryokan where we stayed, seen from our second floor room.

Today we took the train back down the mountain to Nagoya. We managed to get ourselves to Arimatsu, the home of the finest shibori in Japan. It is located along the Tokaido, the old road from Tokyo to Kyoto. The old merchants buildings still line the streets.

How about this elegant noren!

Business is down these days I suppose, and they outsource some work to China, as in all the kimono industry, but you could shop till you drop easily enough in the shops there. I did not want to buy a whole bolt of anything, and the space left in my suitcase is really tiny after five weeks of travel and shopping and all the gifts people give you. My quilts took up a lot of our luggage allotment too, so I restrained myself (pretty much).

There is a nice small museum. There were 50's era posters with kimonos like the antique ones I buy to take apart and resell, and a delightful old lady demonstrating hemp leaf pattern wrapping.

They were moderately impressed with the old nui (embroidered) shibori kimono I remade as a jacket.

Two more days of train travel and we leave for home. Thanks for following along with me. I will keep you up to date with new posts on current projects and Japanese textiles in general.

The Big Day

2008-11-12T14:54:00.000-08:00

Well the big day for this katazome artist has come and it exceeded even my wildest dreams. I had arranged for a Japanese interpreter to accompany me to the workshop (Kobo) of a kimono dyer who uses traditional Okinawan type katazome designs (bingata), although he uses acid dyes and direct dyes rather than the natural dyes and pigments used by the Okinawans and also by John Marshall, who was trained in bingata.

My husband took movies of the processes and when we get home we will figure out how to put them up on You Tube. For now stills will have to do.

This is the big workroom where the dyes are applied.They roll the 12 meter lengths over a set of rollers so the dyer can stay in one place, seated (and not, to my relief, kneeling). They sometimes use a cold steam vaporizer to keep the paste from drying out. Some of what they were working on were obis, some kimonos.

The next room was where they cut stencils and did their designs. From there we went into a long warm room where fabric treated with sizing was stretched to dry. There was fabric with fresh paste covered with fine sawdust to make it more durable, something I have not done, for lack of a source for the fine sawdust. They color their paste blue with aobana, a blue colorant that does not dye the fabric, so it makes it easier to see. At the other end of the room a man was applying paste with a tube to cover designs that had been dyed, so black background dye could be applied. This is exactly what I did with my trout pieces.

Then we went outside to a covered patio area where two guys in waders were in shallow pools with flowing water washing the paste off the fabric, which had been professionally steamed elsewhere. The water was blue from the aobana.

The final room was where the long boards were for applying the paste. They have ceiling racks to store the boards, which are half the length of the kimono. The fabric is attached down one side and back up the other. The dyer remarked that he knows it is time to retire when he can no longer lift the heavy boards. He was applying a second layer of paste to protect the fabric from the penetration by the acid dyes. He says for black they use three layers of paste. This is not something I need to do with pigments.

We finished with a visit with the owner of the kobo. Here he is demonstrating a kind of board clamping used to make fabric for underwear kimono (jyuban).

He is a nice man, the successor to the founder of the business, and an avid amateur Noh actor with 30 years experience! He showed us pictures of himself playing the role of a servant in a costume he made himself. I asked some more questions and told him my background. He was impressed with my work and gave me a copy of a very beautiful book showing the work of his predecessor. He says if I want to return to Japan and study there for a time, I am welcome. So there it is, that is what I hoped to accomplish. It remains to be seen when I can gather the resources to actually do it, but the door is open.

An unexpected adventure

2008-11-08T05:51:00.000-08:00

This afternoon my friend Mici, who has helped so much with the show, took me to an old town, Sasayama. This is a place almost completely off the American tourist path. It has a long main street with Edo period shops. Some have been remodeled to look modern from the street but they are the typical deep narrow buildings with a street-side shop, often open air, that characterize buildings from before the opening of Japan in 1867.

Two of these shops, evidently owned by the same family, sell antique textiles and Mici says they are much less expensive than what I will find in Kyoto. Once the woman who owns the shop realized what I did and how much I knew about these fabrics she invited us up a set of incredibly steep narrow stairs to view the treasured kimonos there. She pulled out kimono after kimono to show us. We were breathless. Mici says she is "a very particular lady", but she was very happy to talk to people, especially an American who really appreciated what she had.

This is a very expensive shibori kimono depicting the Grand Canyon.

In the second shop, which sold kimono pieces, I discovered a really spectacular piece of jishiro cotton. This is a white background katazome fabric dyed with indigo. It requires incredible skill applying resist paste using two stencils to leave delicate lines and dots free to take the dye. Nobody is doing this now and the piece was Edo era. It had been dyed with the same pattern on both sides to use for a summer kimono. Of course it was incredibly expensive, but by this time we had built up enough goodwill to persuade her to sell me a small piece from the end. Wow!

Mici says happily, next time you come we will go there and spend more time (yipes, and money).

The Big Exhibit opens

2008-11-05T04:34:00.001-08:00

The purpose of this trip was from the beginning my exhibit in Japan. Takarazuka City is a place where I now have friends. The nearest big cities are Kobe or Osaka. It is a pretty, scenic place, located in a steep river valley, famous for a women's musical theater, and with about 150,000 population, small by Japanese standards.

The procedure here for private exhibits is to rent a gallery space, pay the owner a set fee and take your chances that sales will cover expenses and give you a profit. I am happy to report that we have paid the gallery after the first two days of the four day show. I define profit rather loosely of course as I doubt the poor economic situation will permit actually selling enough to completely pay for the trip. Still, I am pleased at how people are receiving my work.

Images of all the new work for this show is now uploaded to my web site gallery in the new work category. http://www.nautilus-fiberarts.com It is still minus a few particulars like price and size. We have also added quite a few new indigo patterns.

Here are some pictures of the gallery space. They carefully put lovely autumn flowers in a large apparently unstudied arrangement in the corner.

The gallery looks out on a lovely garden.

Here is everybody's favorite new quilt on the wall, along with two panels dyed with kakishibu, a new dye for me, made from the same persimmon juice used to make the stencil paper I use. Look up http://www.kakishibui.com to find out more about it.

Here we all are after setting up. One day I am going to do a quilt with a row of dainty Japanese dolls and one big American doll, all smiling broadly for the camera. The center of the gallery has a table typically, so potential customers can sit and talk and be offered cups of green tea and little sweets. The quilters group that is helping me quietly takes care of that and keeping track of sales.

This young woman will be my interpreter for a visit next Wednesday to a Kyoto dyers workshop that specializes in Okinawan style katazome, called Bingata, something I am looking forward to very much.

Fabric shopping Bangkok style

2008-10-31T20:00:00.001-07:00

The final textile adventure in Bangkok was a big one. We took the river ferry to Chinatown to experience the Sampeng Lane fabric market. The alley is about 4 ft wide and filled with people, merchandise and porters with heavily loaded hand trucks.

Mixed in were stalls for cheap trinkets and household goods of many descriptions. I did not buy much, just a few notions, because I could not tell the fiber content. I suspect if you shopped with someone who speaks Thai you could find some good stuff, but it was not that drastically different from fabric stores at home, except of course for the ambiance.

While we were in there the heavens opened and it poured rain. The awnings on both sides funnelled the water right down the middle of the alley. People huddled in shop doorways and clerks quickly covered fabric with plastic and tarps. When it stopped people just picked up and went on with their business.

At the end of the street was the Indian fabric market, filled with saris and fancy dance costumes. It was just a riot of color.

We saw these women operating what looked like a sidewalk alterations business with a treadle sewing machine on the sidewalk. Anybody who complains about inadequate studio space etc. just has no idea how hard it must be to live and work in downtown Bangkok, but it was such a rich experience visually.

These were iron-on appliques, but so prettily displayed. We saw so many butterflies in the wooded parts of Thailand, I suppose because of all the flowers.

Pictures finally

2008-10-26T17:01:00.000-07:00

Our internet connections have been kind of iffy so today I will add the pictures I have had to leave out. This is the cotton weaver's lovely place I described last time. The looms are underneath the house.

The little shelter is water vessels put out to welcome visitors, although from what I could tell they are the same kind of vessels used for dyeing.

This is the apparatus used for preparing silk warps, and a detail. As someone not a weaver I found this fascinating.

These are shots of Shinawatra, and the lovely batik I bought.

On the last morning along the Mekong the proprietor had several bolts of silk ikat and raw silk standing in the corner. He said he had bought them a long time ago. The hitch was that I had to buy the whole bolt, one of which was 10 meters, but they were a steal otherwise. When I decide how much I will need of the long bolt of soft brown and silver I will post a picture and open it up to share the rest with you all.

Yesterday on the way back from sightseeing we stopped at the Jim Thompson outlet. They had a bazillion colors of silk on bolts at $10/yd. I nearly went crazy limiting myself to the golds I was after.

Chiang Mai Thailand

2008-10-25T19:20:00.000-07:00

More textile adventures, this time with pictures. We drove with friends from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, which is really the center for crafts and fabrics in Thailand. We visited a village that makes bamboo umbrellas, and stopped at the factory of Thailand's second largest silk manufacturer, Shinawatra. We were greeted with little silk blossom boutonnier pins and refreshing drinks offered by pretty Thai girls. They had weavers working out back, weaving and preparing a striped warp and nice live demonstrations of silkworm cultivation and spinning. The native silk in Thailand makes a brilliant yellow cocoon, and the silk is a pale creamy gold. They raise Chinese white cocoons too.The shop was amazing and they let us take pictures. Prices for silk were about $ 15-$20/yd, comparable to what I pay for much poorer quality doupioni at home. They had lovely prints and batiks, as well as stylish finished garments.

The next day we drove to the farm of a woman who was considered a cultural treasure. It is now a museum with an active cotton weaving center. She almost single handedly revived weaving cotton as a cottage industry and all the fibers were dyed with natural dyes in lovely old ceramic dye pots. It was POURING rain so they had sent the weavers home. The looms were in the space under the lovely old stilted teak traditional house. We could not take pictures indoors. I will try to unpack some of my purchases soon and send pictures of them.

Tonight we are in a lovely retreat on the Mekong River, across from Laos. My former AFS daughter has just pulled out all the stops for this visit. I have to say my husband is being a really good sport about all this textile emphasis, as well as the food adventures. He is not wild about spicy food and fish, so I am the official taster.

Pictures added later.

Jim Thompson

2008-10-22T15:44:00.000-07:00

For those of you who love gorgeous Thai silk, the man to thank is a former architect and American military officer assigned to post war Thailand. He single-handedly revived a silk weaving industry that was on its last legs.He eventually settled here in a gorgeous home and garden nestled in the bustle of Bangkok. He made it from several one-room traditional building knit together skillfully and filled with his antique collection. He disappeared in the Malaysian jungle in 1968 when on vacation and no trace of him has ever been found. The home tour revealed a printing block in the Chinese style that I found fascinating. It was quite large, and you applied paint to it before laying the cloth on it, but the interesting thing was that it had a number of design elements that could be removed and replaced if you wanted to change color in the middle of a printing run.

The shop itself is a high end boutique place now. It reminds me most of Liberty of London, lots of ties, scarves and small gifts, but some lovely fabrics as well. We sneaked a couple of pictures, one of a pashmina shawl that took two years to delicately embroider, and was priced accordingly!

Today we leave for Chiang Mai. More textile adventures coming up there.

Inspiration from funny sources

2008-10-16T04:34:00.000-07:00

I have an exhibit in two weeks in Takarazuka Japan. We are relaxing in Osaka, Japan tonight, having nearly killed ourselves getting ready to go. I had 16 new pieces photographed Monday AM. (whew!) They should show up on the web site pretty soon. A few things did not get finished but I am the only one who knows about them and I won't tell anybody.

In the airport today we saw something that inspired me greatly. It was a full wall pierced sculpture. At first I thought it was butterfly wings or something, but when we saw the whole thing it was clearly the bottom of Spanish dancers, done in the style of papel picado, the Mexican cut paper used for decorative banners. I have cut stencils in this style before and they are really great fun. Look at the interesting lattice pattern that ties the images together.

More from Japan and Thailand soon. All sorts of textile adventures await me!

Noren

2008-10-08T13:38:00.000-07:00

amused
I am sorry this has taken so long. I have been struggling with the spam rules. Lots to learn apparently. The sun is out and my garden is not looking too bad after our recent rain. Last night I bribed a group of friends with indigo panels to sew the bindings on the last three quilts, to save the wear and tear on my arthritic thumb. I can cut stencils all day with my right hand but the left hand complains if I have to sew bindings on.

I delivered a custom noren the other day. Noren are door curtains. You see them in pictures of many businesses and restaurants in old Kyoto, often in indigo. They are suppposed to separate the calm interior fom the dust and noise of the street. I was amused to read somewhere recently that you should choose a restaurant with the dirtiest noren because it suggests lots of customers have been going in and out. They are still commonly used in homes as well, to provide visual privacy along with ventilation in small spaces. They can be short, to decorate a doorway, or almost floor length. They are changed seasonally. Summer noren are usually made of hemp or ramie (asa). Winter noren are often heavy cotton, dyed with indigo. I love the form, split in the middle with some faggoting or hand stitching to hold them together at the top. The ones I make are usually about 40 inches long, because they are more often used as wall hangings and that is a good proportion if I use traditional 14 inch wide fabric. I can get wider fabric too.This one uses a stencil of the Three Sisters and another of a Ponderosa Pine tree. The asa takes the pigment dyes so smoothly. I love working with them.This one uses a stencil of the Three Sisters and another of a Ponderosa Pine tree. The asa takes the pigment dyes so smoothly. I love working with them.

One down, umpteen to go

2008-10-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

I am delighted with the positive response to my debut post.

Thought you might like to see the next project. This is the first new piece in a series I call "Collector's Items". I love the variation in the natural world. One fossil, one diatom, one dragonfly is not enough. I need the whole collection. This dragonfly in an Oregon native. In researching them I discovered that there are only two basic architectures for the pattern in a dragonfly wing. I cut two pairs of wings and several different bodies, so I can put them together in many different combinations. This blue skimmer is about 18" across from wingtip to wingtip. The finished piece is not photographed yet. I dyed a linen silk blend fabric from Exotic silks, using mostly my watercolor soy dyes, with a little added acrylics for details.

Why am I doing this anyway?

2008-10-04T15:27:00.000-07:00

As a busy studio artist actively engaged in the art of katazome I could be called crazy to start a blog, but there is just so much to share! I have a pretty nice web site nautilus-fiberarts.com with a lot of finished pieces, and a brief description of the process, but the day-to-day work and the development of designs is beyond the scope of a web site, especially when I have to depend on my long-suffering husband to keep it up to date...... Right now I am in the throes of completing a lot of new quilts and noren (Japanese door curtains) to take with me to Japan for an exhibit coming up in early November. It has been raining outside so you should see the bathroom festooned with drying fabric!

Having had a full summer of teaching and getting our daughter off to college I am running behind! But this trip is going to be so fabulous that it seems a pity not to get the blog started now so I know what I am doing when we have internet connections over there. I am sure there are a lot of "bells and whistles" that I will learn to add as time goes on. Right now it is just the basics.

I finished dyeing the last quilt top today and will deliver it to the machine quilter tomorrow. Thank goodness for Linda's good instincts, which match my vision so perfectly. I would die for a long-arm machine at times like this, but I can't justify the expense or the floor space for the amount of time I would use it, so when I get in a crunch I unashamedly rely on her skills.

This is a detail of the big quilt she finished yesterday. It is silk doupioni overdyed with gray dye after I put the resist paste on. I have been cutting a lot of small stencils from organic patterns in the last several years and this is a sampler of all of them. I think I will call it "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral". Now I have to bind it......