shakerag

i'm delighted to advise that Shakerag have published their workshop details for 2010

and that they're kindly letting me offer two courses there next summer

Quiltfelt Landskin
In the quiltfelt landskin class students will undertake daily windfall walks, dyeing strips of fabric to be used in a layered, pieced, stitched , quilted and ultimately also felted cloth whose gentle colours will reflect those of the woods around us. The pieced cloth will grow organically day by day as small dyed fragments are added, before a gentle wet-fulling process is applied on the last day followed by one final overdye to bring harmony to the piece in the form of a last colour wash.

and

A walk in the woods
Every plant gives some kind of colour, depending on how it is processed. This class will embrace a number of methods for colour extraction as well as protocols for plant collection and plant identification.

Participants will explore the local area around Shakerag through writing, drawing, stitching, and dyeing, taking mindful windfall walks, mapping marks, observing and responding to the essence of the woods.

During the week we will dye silk and wool, using windfall leaves from the woods, and construct a series of small leaf-illustrated textile notebooks that will be both maps of the journey taken and documents recording the week’s explorations.

We will work with plant dyes, stitching, paper, and cloth.

this of course allows me my [fast becoming annual] pilgrimage to San Francisco [don't worry, we're planting trees here to make up for all those flights]

and

means that i'll be stateside when Eco Colour [the American version] is published there on July 1, 2010