nemo ignorat

Who said natural dyes have to be dull

One thing I always hear when I talk to uninitiated people about natural dyeing is: yeah, but the colours are always so bland and dull and they all look warm and autumny.

True, most colours I get from plants that grow outside my door or the ones I get directly from my kitchen, are warm and in an autumn range. But then there are the others.

 

They were made as demonstration pieces for my current workshop on painting and printing with natural dyes. All natural dyes on linen fabric. Not dull at all, eh? ;o)

and a bit more pastel

Still not sure, what I'm going to do with them. They are way too colourful for my taste to put them in a quilt (as I originally planned to do), so I think more in the direction of wall art. Frame them and find a nice place in the house for them.

The nice thing about these sample pieces from my classes is that I am pushed beyond my usual comfort zone boundaries. But still ... nah, not exactly "me".

More "me" is a pair of trousers I refurbished. Wonderful trousers out of a great and durable but white denim. Work pants all over - just in white. And since white is nice because when in doubt you can just boil it, it still isn't quite the right colour for someone like me. So, after 2 years of wear and tear (or better wear and dirt) I decided to give them a colour that didn't show so much. And to add some interest, they got some ornaments a shade darker.

The shade is a touch too inconspicuous to make it visible on a picture of the whole leg or tousers. But it still adds a bit of interest to it. And since I won't stop washing my jeans because of it, I'm sure the ornament will be more visible over time. It's printed on with iron acetate and dyed with onion skin.

January colours and the online class

I'm still working on my book. I'm working intensely, and seeing the finishing line at the horizon, writing becomes more an obsession. To be honest, I want it finished. Rather sooner than later. I feel the need to work with my hands again but don't have the quietness of mind that allows me to do it. So my creative work is mostly in my head right now.

One idea I had was to collect the colours of my surroundings over the months. And so I will begin with the colours of January (shortly before it melts into February)

No snow. No whites. Browns and a surprising amount of green.

It's so wet. Moss is growing everywhere. Usually, where I live is a rather dry place. Get a humindity of 50% and people will begin to whine how humid it is. But we had mostly rain for the past 2 months. The forest paths are muddy and the meadows are swampy. Luckily the forest ground still soaks it up. And the moss grows.

And then there are the ivy berries. Huge clusters. Must be the rain.

Feeding the black birds and the starlings.

And sometimes you can find some yellow remnant of a puff-ball fungus standing eerie looking in between the dry leaves. Already algae are growing on it.

I uploaded the informations of my online class into my new English shop The Elfin Dip.

The class will take place in a closed wordpress blog between April 15th and June 20th 2015. I will explore the possibilities of immersion dyeing, printing and painting with natural dyes on cotton and linen fabrics and yarns (with a side dish of silk fabrics). As online classes go, I will provide you with the necessary informations in pictures (still and moving) and in written and spoken word. And you will have the opportunity to experiment at home, ask me questions, and show your works. Or just silently participate, watching and lurking. Just as you wish. Though I'd prefer some non-silent participants, it makes my teachings so much easier.

No prior knowledge of natural dyeing is necessary.

Printing on Fabric with Natural Dyes

The longer you don't blog the harder it gets to write again. So much has happened but it's all gone now. For good and bad. Mostly for good, 'cause most of the things that happened over the last months went from not so good to bad to worse. Up and down and up and down only that the up phases were not so up each time and the down parts took longer and longer. But as I said, gone for good - I hope.

On the bright side, I was printing with natural dyes on fabric. So far mostly test prints.

printed with wood stamps

From waaay back I still had some Indian block print stamps from printing with deka fabric dye. Back in the 70s and 80s they were sold for decoration and you still could get them for a reasonable price. Then, loads of people decided it would be absolutely cool to buy one and the prices went up into nether regions I couldn't even begin to ponder. But when I looked now, after I got reinfested with the printing bug, now that I mastered the challenge of printing with natural dyes, they are being made again and you can get them on etsy directly from India. For a reasonable price. I just hope the crafts people in India get a more or less fair share.

BTW I would love to show you more pictures but my computer broke down in November with a faulty hard drive and I could save most of my data but as I found out afterwards, none of my pictures. I wept for days. I had most of them saved on an external drive but - as I found out afterwards - not all as I thought I had. With all what went on during the last months some things fell in between the cracks.

And since I wanted to try more printing techniques, I made my own silk screen stencil.

and this got me going. I love making the stencils. And I love the seemingly repetetiveness of the motive.

All of the above prints, I printed on predyed fabric (with natural dyes).  But since I boil my fabrics after a while of curing I know that the prints are pretty much washfast. They don't crock and they seem to be rather lightfast as well. But I have to be careful with the fabric I choose. Most prints I did on vintage cotton which became very stiff with the handling necessary before and after printing. I might use it on pillow cases or bags now but not on a blanket. It works well on already soft cotton and on batist, be it from cotton, linen or ramie.

This one is done on harem cloth (cotton batist) with a katagami-like stencil I cut and then I painted the dye on. The background is some overoveroverdyed tannin, indigo, whatnot and the dye I used here is Bengala dyes. Admitedly not the such labeld bought stuff which is way too expensive but the simple iron oxide pigments they use in Japan. I got mine from Kremer's Pigmente, a store where you can buy all the dye painters use and it cost me about 1/10th of the price Bengala dyes cost.

And while I was on it, I also made a few christmas cards.

This time, I stencilled in several colours on a resist dyed indigo background. I love the effect and will certainly explore this angle more. Even though the dyes are pretty intense. Usually I prefer my colours a bit more muted. But everything natural ;o) The red is from stick lac, the blue is indigo (of course) and the yellow is rhamnus. The aubergine comes from logwood.

And speaking of christmas, I crochteted (yes, I can crochet, even if it isn't my favourite technique) two bears ;o)

Many years ago, I had already knot a teddy bear. Which was definitely a once in a life time experience.

I knit him in 09. His name's Yoshi and he's living with a friend who collects teddy bears

As much as I like them, teddy bears are not my favourites to crochet or knit.

I sorted my planning for next year and will offer the "cotton dye and print with natural dyes" class in April and May. June I will be teaching in the Online Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers and July/August will be dyeing classes in German. As with all online classes you will be able to get back to the material forever, so there is no need to rush and you won't have to participate directly during class time. Though it is advisable if you want fast response.

I will set up a new online shop for english speaking customers within the next days. It is just not practial to combine it with my German shop.

some mending

while it will take some more time to mend the Bobic shaped hole in my heart, I could begin with some trousers.

My (naturally) favourite jeans was honorably worn out  and needed some mending. A lot of mending. Really a lot of mending. It felt good to get my old jeans back to work again.

There is still some more work to do, but I'm on it.

The main reason for all this radio silence is my ongoing indigo online workshop. Since soming back from Japan with so many ideas, I expanded the programme which takes some more time than usual. We're now at katazome dyeing ;o)

Resist paste drying.

from this katagami

Japan Journey 2

 Since we all arrived on different days, most of us met in the lobby of a hotel in Tokyo. Which was more or less on the other side of town. Underestimating the Japanese inability to speak English and overestimating my own sense of direction, I wandered around more or less in circles on my search for Tokyo Station. It was easier the day before when I arrived and just took the most direct route to the hostel. 45 minutes later (I did even then see interesting parts of Tokyo‘s banking quarter which were not supposed to be on my direct route) I arrived there and that was it. But the next day I felt adventurous and thought I could just walk to Shinjuku Station next to which we were supposed to meet. And it would have been possible only I lost my way so many times on the way to Tokyo Station that what took me 45 minutes the day before took me more than 1.5 hours the next day. And yes, I have Google maps and I had a physical map as well. Google maps shows only Kanji (the Chinese-Japanese characters) and doesn‘t seem to be quite sure about directions either when it comes to navigation and my physical map only showed Romanji (our letter system). Yes, Tokyo has his main streets labeled with both writing systems. But I got lost in the maze of small backstreets with no Romanji street signs. A very, very nice policeman (with less than basic English) put me back on my track and then I just took a taxi (whose driver didn’t speak English either) to Shinjuku Station and arrived just in time after an odyssey of almost 3 hours.

wikipedia commons pic of shinjuku station yamamoto line - I was too confused to take any pictures

 

Like with so many big cities it seems almost unbelievable how rural it can become only a few kilometers outside the wider city boundaries. And Fujino is rural.

this is how bamboo sprouts - I was constantly amazed at this wonder

 

Wonderfully so with those lush green steep hills, bamboo forests, tea terraces and the scattered farm houses. Walking up the steep hill to Bryan’s house you are greeted by two large indigo vats in ceramic pots that are standing right and left to his main entrance. We would use these vats every day over the course of the next 10 days.

The first thing Bryan did was to get us introduced into the chemistry of the indigo vats, how to judge the vat’s health, feed it with what it might need and how to use it.

Since not all of us had experience in dyeing with indigo out first exercise was over dyeing several skeins of cotton yarn. Indigo has the wonderful property of making everything look much nicer. Even weird beige colours and ghastly turquoises. Bryan owns an old industrial knitting machine with which he produces long tubes of knitted fabric. And those over dyed yarns were meant for this knitting machine. At the end of the workshop each of us got her piece of knitted fabric. It might just be enough to a sleeveless t-shirt, I’m still pondering. (Which will take me a while like always.)

knitted fabric from our first cotton skeins. Slightly striped with darker, lighter and mottled indigo skeins

With the over dyeing of the skeins, Bryan established a kind of base line for his students. From where he could move on. With out next task we moved to the large and wide field of shibori. I had some experience with basic shibori stitching in the past. During Glennis’ workshops I folded those mandalas and stitched the dragon fly. More or less successful.

 

folded triangles stitched and dyed

 At Bryan’s I was introduced to the high ART of Shibori. The many variations, the time and effort one can invest in one piece and the nice little tricks in dyeing it. I didn’t put that much time into Shibori though because of all the many other textile techniques I was offered.

 

96 year old Ogata san visitig us, making Udon noodles and dyeing shibori in between

 

Ogata san in front of her shibori pieces

 

one of Mini's shibori pieces which took her the better part of two weeks to prepare

 

Especially Katazome. Katazome is the Japanese craft of stencelling a resist on fabric. Something I really wanted to learn now for quite a while. We have a similar technique in Germany called Blaudruck. But unlike Katazome this is done by printing the resist with wood block prints onto the fabric before dyeing it with indigo (in our case it was mostly done with woad and naturally we wouldn’t use rice paste but some wheat flour paste but that’s just local flavour). Because of the wood blocks local patterns usually are much smaller and live mostly from the repeat.

 

one of my katazome pieces

 

a vintage stencil

 

Katagami are larger and the patterns can be much more elaborate depending on the provenance. Kaki Shibugami, the special stencil paper is made from paper glued together by fermented unripe persimmon juice high in tannin content and then smoked over a wood fire for several days. It is almost impossible to get outside of Japan (and if only to exhorbitant prices) and since unripe not sweet kaki are not available at my place (or anywhere near) I will have to find another method to produce something similar useful.

 

my little shifuku pouch

 

 

 

 

you can see the silk netting that is glued to one side to protect the stencils from falling apart

 

Right now I’m thinking of walnut or oak tannin or simply boiled lineseed oil as it is used as base coat in paintings. If all fails I will have to resort to plastic stencil paper. Not my favourite but better than buying the original stuff from Japan (or someplace else). Again, something I have to ponder about. After shibori we got out our homework. He had send us some shibugami to cut our own stencils at home.

 

resist paste

 

And now he showed us how to make the resist paste (although we ended up using ready to use resist paste everything else would have ended in very complicated logistics with 9 people), how to prepare the stencils and the fabric and how to apply the paste onto the stencil and the fabric. And he brought us to a katazome master whose workshop we could visit and use for some smaller stencil experiments. Especially his fermentation indigo vats were very interesting.

Mini's katazome. Resisted, dried, dyed, resisted again, dried, dyed and I lost count if there werde more stages involved

 

a katazome piece consisting only of tiny dots

 

the above after dyeing

 

From Katazome we moved on to Kumihimo and Weaving. (Not that we didn't still do all the other things as well.  Bryan's workshop is more like a textile bootcamp with little sleep and more craft possibilities than you can imagine. At one point I was so overwhelmed by all the possibilities I just stood a little dazed in the hall doing nothing until my head cleared. At least food and entertainment is really nice.)

Right from the start I was hooked on kumihimo. So much that I ordered my own Marudai (the stand you use for braiding) over the internet at home. Luckily for me I already have the bobbins. A craft shop closed several years ago and sold them for a bargain. And I like them for fixing broken warp threads. The Marudai, made by a local wood turner from local wood, arrived on wednesday and it is so beautiful. And in use already.

Our little bits of weaving (about half a yard each) were done on a very old traditional Japanese loom. She was called – very endearingly – The Beast by all of us outsized gaijin women. And she had tended to bitch around a bit eating warp threads by the dozen if you were not careful. But we succeeded in weaving our piece without any long term damages.

And I was introduced to another bit of weaving. One of us was so nice to show Bryan how to warp and thread his 4 shaft loom. As I understood it the loom was a rather new acquisition and he and her were not quite on good terms yet. Luckily I had the chance to take more than a peek and learn so much for my own 4 shaft darling. Thank you for the opportunity.

And all the while we dyed on, learned to sew little pouches called shifiku, visited the Folkart Museum in Tokyo, learned how to behave in an Onsen (my first time) and learned how much all parts of Japanese culture are interlaced into each other.

Japan was a rather isolated country for more than a millenium. Just imagine a country whose basic garment design didn’t change for 1300 years. (Look at how people clothed themselves in the 6^th century Europe and then in the 10^th or the 11^th, the 12^th or during rokkoko, baroque, regency ….?) And now imagine those 1300 years only wearing one kind of clothing. A more or less practical one and one on whose fabric amount taxes were paid. A basic piece of clothing that had only the chance to subtle changes. Much like the whole society. Imagine a country with a continuing line of crafts and craftspeople, without the suppression of the church, without cultural setbacks and lost inventions, lost knowledge and without permanent waves of mass migration from one end of the continent to the other, without constant invading forces that brought their own culture with them and without next to none external influences. And you get a culture which had so much time to get so intricately interlaced that from subtle non-verbal communication to flower arrangements to tea ceremonies from pottery to fabrics everything is connected. This realisation hit me at one point. How close knit the Japanese culture (at least up to WW2) was. How little was left to accident and choice. And how different it was to ours. European culture is basically the antithesis to Japanese culture.

Even in early days celtic rulers (I’m talking about him, 500 BC) in what today is Southern Germany were buried with Greek pottery and amber from the Baltic Sea. Trade later reached as far as China (Silk Road) and all over the world. There were so many different oppressing, suppressing and encouraging influences over the millennia. And how impossible it is to compare both cultures. (And I am talking only about Japanese and the European hotpot, ignoring the fact that there are so many other cultures out there either almost or actually extinct or still existing, ignoring whole continents of culture and societies just for the sake of literary flow.)

I am completely fascinated and feel like I am on the first steps of a new road. Embarking on a journey, one that might lead me nowhere or to a lot of interesting places. Who knows.

momo (back) and geiger (front) in the entrance hall

 

well, I'm back

still a bit dizzy from travelling back in time. Left Tokyo on Friday at noon, reached Moskow at 5 pm - after 10 hours flight, a short break of barely 3 hours while in transit. And finally reached my destination Frankfurt at 9 pm after another 3.5 hours flight. Travelling westward is confusing and though my body doesn't seem to suffer from jet lag, my mind is still not in synch with local time - or place.

Japan was fascinating and Tokyo was confusing. I am not a big city person. I've been to London, Rome and Paris but all those cities are simply big and old and populated but not a really BIG city like Tokyo (or as I suspect New York).

There are typical big city glas buildings

confusing street scenes (remember, I'm a small town girl)

funny ways of parking cars

and cute cabin bunk beds in hostels

btw this cute little suitcase and the bag were my whole luggage for the travel. I was so proud of me and it worked: 8.7 kg carry-on for 2 weeks - yeah. On my way home it was 11.7 kg and I went for check-in (instead of distributing the overweight in my shoulder bag)

gingko trees lining the streets

and along the sidewalk as well

manhole covers look different

and cute cats warn you in front of railway crossings (which was in Fujino not in Tokyo)

The workshop was a real experience, I gained so much new knowledge, learned so many new things, I still have to let it sit in my mind and mull it over.

Bryan is a wonderful teacher. With a magpie mind not unlike my own I was able to dive into a huge pool of knowledge. We dyed at the indigo vat, stitched and folded shibori pieces, braided kumihimo cords, wove on a Japanese loom, stencilled katazome, visited a katazome master in his workshop and were able to use his vats, learned a practical lesson about Ikebana, partook in a tea ceremony, walked through the Folkart Museum in Tokyo, warmed up in an onsen (hot bath), ate so many wonderful meals at Bryan's house and about, worked voluntarily through the night and went quiet at the campfire in Bryan's yard. We learned about silk worm raising, how to reel silk and how to make silk threads interesting and we dyed with madder and gardenia. I met wild monkeys and learned how bamboo grows. And we bought some things from local artesans and vintage.

a typical feast at Bryan's house

I was lucky that the group consisted of so many wonderful textile enthusiasts from all over the world. We helped each other and we all learned a lot from each other.

the countryside around Bryan's house

And I found the most beautiful kimono/coat in a vintage textile shop

a vintage travel kimono - how fitting

I had to make it my own with my one of my shibori pieces and some sashiko stitching. Every coat needs at least one pocket. Kimono or not ;o)

barefoot traveller -  as always

I just came home in time for my mother's 88th birthday, so a more detailed text will have to wait but I will tell you more, rest assured. And I have to try a new vat. Since I was hooked on Kumihimo at once, I ordered a Marudai while still in Japan. I hope it will arrive within the next days. This kind of braiding is so relaxing and I want to make some braids from linen yarn.

The Japanese loom was endearingly called The Beast.

The Beast

She is a wonderful little old loom and warms up to people only tentatively. But she still works.

See you later friends with more pictures and stories. Still overwhelmed and confused ....

and another dye class

cotton velevt in onionskin, damask in old fustic, madder, logwood with iron acetate and logwood tie dyed

Last weekend my still a bit improvised studio saw another dye class. We had lots of fun with onion skins, old fustic. logwood, indigo, madder, oak bark and walnut hulls. We tried getting patterns on fabrics with iron acetate before dyeing them in another colour. I demonstrated bundle dyeing and since I don't like to open the bundles after only three days, I opened one of mine.

refreshened shirt with dahlias, hibiscus and whatnot

One of the students craved for some muddled colours after all these clear bright ones and got into an overdye binge with what was left in the dye pots. I think the basis was logwood but after some dips here and some dips there I lost track.

overdye binge

and another one bundled with jam lids and yarn and overdyed it several times to get this most beautiful moon and sun fabric. At least that's what I called it.I learn so much from my students, from their carefree way to just thow stuff in, bundling it up and just having fun. It sometimes seems that from the moment I set them free at the dye pots, they sprout wings and dye as if there was no tomorrow.

I tell my students to roll their freshly dyed fabrics and to let them rest for a while before washing them out properly or risking direct sun light. The rolling prevents folds at which freshly dyed cotton and linen tends to loose colour. (Though if you want it, you could just fold your freshly dyed cloth, fold it several times and set it in the sun. This way you would get a rather unique and very interesting sun shibori.)

And yesterday I received a very interesitng book from India.

To be honest, I love the rough paper and the exotic stamps on foreign mail. So I had to keep the customs stamp for this one.

The book is from 1959 and was reprinted several times. The fifth edition is from 2010 so I think it should be the latest. It is still full of incredible information about the production of yarns, fibres, fabrics and how to care for them. A treasure for everyone interested in textiles.

summer's blues

Last weekend a nice student booked me for two days dye workshop. She wanted to overdye some old clothes. So we dyed and did some theory in the background and dyed some more and this is what I liked the most ;o)

 

just my kind of colour, unfortunately not mine but my students kept it ;o)

 

After doing some really necessary stuff on monday (you know all the tedious office stuff and some bureaucracy and such) I got some time to do some dyeing for myself yesterday.

 

I over dyed some lace which looks really beautiful in blue

 

The reason I like my student's tee so much is because the result is a matter of accident, it was dyed and over dyed so many times with different dyes that in the end we didn't know which dye did what and that it was absolutely not accurate.

Right now, in my stadium of dye knowledge I seem not to be able anymore to do some serendipidous dyeing. I know what will happen and I can plan it beforehand. Which is nice, like being able to spin the yarn you plan and want but not chancy enough anymore.

 

this is my favourite dye pattern - oh I love stripes

And just like in spinning, now is the time to learn to let go of the knowledge again, drifting in the flow.

I think, letting go is my greatest inadequacy. I wouldn't say problem. Self-control and self-discipline are very nice once in a while.

But we all need balance.

 

the teaching of colours and dyes

ALmost a year ago, I jumped back into the saddle of the teaching horse and haven't left it since. And last weekend I was back at my friend's studio teaching the cellulose fibre class.

this is what a teacher's fingers looked like at the end

Plant dyes and plant fibres are my fascination. I know, it's not fair towards wool (silk is something totally different though) but this reluctance with which cellulose fibres take on (or not) natural dyes is absolutely fascinating.

madder, logwood, onion skin

We dyed with several different plants on different mordants whatever cellulose fibre we got our hands on. There was cotton, of course, linen, but hemp as well and ramie and some nettle yarn.

We dyed conventional and with a more modern approach. And I tried to teach a well founded chemical basis.

one student carefully wrapped single flowers into a t-shirt shibori style

overdyed it with onoin skin, eucalyptus leaves and madder with astonishing effects

The students were interested and I hope they had as much fun as I did.

At our last day, I showed them Michel Garcia's organic vat and we added greens and purples to our dye palette.

madder on fine linen

logwood on linen

onion skin like crackled egg shells

and some bundles with flowers

dyeing like in a chinese street kitchen

my favourite part, living camping style for the time

a whole dye kitchen in one mini van

I'll be visiting my friend's studio again next year. In the meantime I have ample opportunities to work on my teaching, learn new things and make tiny little baby steps in getting better at natural dyeing.

more basics

I'm getting the hang of it and I'm very confident to get some basic wardrobe done this year.

During the latest cold spell and monsoon (you cannot call this rain we had lately just rain, it poured, it came down in buckets, it didn't stop until all the clouds were empty) I felt like hurrying a bit with the needle killing sweater. I did, I finished it and it became a tunic. You could call it a mini as well but no way I'd be wearing it without trousers. Not me.

I admit, it looks a bit weird but it wears well which is the most important thing.

The yarn is handspun, the coloured bits are naturally dyed and the grey is wool from some British sheep I didn't remember because I couldn't find the label anymore.

Next is another basic top. This time I used my favourite top pattern. One I made for myself several years ago and which I used already for some linen tops. I based the pattern on the parts from other tops that fitted me best. Like the neckline from one and the arm hole shape from another. Most top patterns are either to wide in the arm hole so that you reveil too much or they are too narrow and uncomfortable. Same with the neckline. So I combined whatever was best into one pattern.

I extended the pattern to keep more of the dyed fabric. It is a silk bourette jersey tube I dyed with cocheneal during my last class to show a simple resist pattern and I'm really looking forward wearing it.The blue spots at the bottom are some contaminations from logwood that happened during drying. But I like it. It looks a bit weird.

BTW Peggy: sewing jersey is really simple as long as you do it by hand. I really hate sewing it by machine. The machine makes it all very complicated but by hand it is much like any other fabric.