slowness

on the way home from Warrnambool i spent time with someone whose work i respect and whose opinions and thoughts i value very highly. during conversation he introduced me to TED, a fascinating site that offers talks [by people with passion] about an diverse range of subject matter 

he also kindly took the photo above for me as i wasn't carrying a camera...

i wandered thither during a quiet moment yesterday and was delighted to find a talk by Carl Honore, advocate of slowness. his philosophy of undertaking tasks or activities individually rather than multi-tasking and of being fully engaged with the matter at hand sings most harmoniously with the mantra "time is your friend"... something i've been telling my students for a long time

the dyebath above ... a slow cauldron of choisya ternata in a copper pot, contained within a larger stainless steel pot [to save the copper pot from the flames] only revealed full potential after many hours of gentle steeping

but well worth the effort, the lovely fresh green it produced being notoriously tricky to achieve according to traditional plant dye texts

during that same week a slow windfall walk revealed other treasures too, colours that cannot be achieved through traditional dye extraction but are visible [ie unaffected by the water of the dyebath] when processed in contact

the print above was from a fungus growing in the lawn...

speaking of slowness and of taking time... news has reached me that a recent student is already formulating plans for a plant dye course she will teach at her college. a most laudable notion, certainly, but not something i would have felt comfortable proposing after a relatively short exposure to the field. perhaps, though, she has a long dye history that i'm completely unaware of, but given the bombardment of questions that were coming my way from that quarter for a month or so i suspect that may not be the case

the book Eco Colour was only published after many years research into dyeing with plants and now [some two years since handing the manuscript to my publisher] i feel i have as much still to learn. i'm deeply grateful to my many students for their brave experiments in classes over the years - fifteen people bringing their own hand to the same pool of materials discover so much more than one person working alone in a studio

and maybe there's the lesson in this, that by teaching a skill one actually learns more about it...

so i wish her luck and look forward to the development of new and exciting ecologically sustainable dye techniques emerging from the west country of that Green and Pleasant land

and remember, go slow...