that our studio space was positioned in a most romantic place
Camp Casey
on the coast, by the Salish Sea
with a forest behind
and remarkable fortifications to explore
the buildings were spare and beautiful, white walls, wooden floors
and with a room above the studio that we could use for installations, poetry readings, the occasional dance...and a good space in which to practice my lovely Native American flute
the beach proved a marvellous studio space as well
and falling leaves from the forest behind coloured cloth as well as paper
and such beautiful stones
from Whidbey I came to Vancouver, which seems to be a city of stone stackers
at Maiwa East we worked on our aprons, wrote poetry, received the blessing of blue
and made string
some of the string found itself transformed
and all of it became blue in the course of time
eucalypts, as ever, seem to be incurably fascinating, and a student was very happy with her work (below)
especially when combined with local colour
in our class at Maiwa we had a songbird
here's one of the songs she sang for us (or rather, to the indigo vats)
unaccompanied and with the voice of an angel
and may i say
her version eclipsed the original, and the Sarah Mc Lachlan cover
i'll be on my way home soon
dreaming blue dreams way up in the sky
The sort of person who is the reason there's a warning on the curling wand...for external use only.
He angrily demanded to know what I was doing...just after I had deposited a small handful of boiled plant matter under a bush, in the obviously misguided belief that organic matter is nutritious and helps prevent evaporation.
He insisted I pick it up, as he doesn't approve of such stuff and prefers the pine bark chips. It appears he is the self-constituted warden of the Greenwich steps...
I swallowed any possible acrid response, smiled sweetly, picked up the offending matter and wished him a pleasant day. (Though it was very tempting to tell him that the phenols in the pine bark actively inhibit plant growth.)
I understand that it could be overwhelming if every person in the city tucked all their green waste into public gardens...but these were leaves that had literally been gathered from the surrounding streets.
Who knows what corners they may have blown into if I hadn't picked them up.
I moved on, whereupon he followed me around the district at twenty paces, watching as I cleaned the sidewalks of more leaf litter. I did an extra round just to give him a bit more exercise.
having very publicly condemned the transport of bio-hazards around the whirled i thought i would share with you, for your amusement, the pre-flight clearing of the lovely Whipping+Post tote that carries the bits and bobs i seem to need each day
what the picture doesn't show [because i took them out already]
a journal [stuffed to the gills with scraps]
my passport
stones from Baker Beach, Lopez Island and Willunga Beach
a seashell from Port Elliot
my SilkyMerino infinity scarf
my batfone
a lot of pencils and a small watercolour set
my trusty raybans
a couple of tsunobukuro shopping bags
a rusty nail from New Orleans
and also a fan from the above
the bombay sapphire bottle i carry water in
several messy notes on the backs of envelopes
and the dress i was finishing while waiting somewhere
there's a reason this tote is called the Swiss Army Knife of bags!
back in January of 2011 i set up a few experiments in order to test a theory about the alchemy of archaeology. the first results were unpacked in the middle of 2012
and now
right at the end of 2013
i've put together a book.
quite a few of you have asked for online classes
but somehow i couldn't yet bring myself to do that
so, being a little old-fashioned, i've written this little book instead.
it contains a technique you can do even in the smallest of apartments
and that i think you will want to do over and over again.
i was thinking about the mould problem that occurs while we wait patiently for bundles to ripen
and about the chewing-and-running-away-with problem that has popped up when certain puppies decide to play
and about how hard it is to wait
unless
we secure our bundles in such a way that they look so gorgeous we will be able to resist
and the good thing is that this process produces brighter results from those delicate anthocyanin-rich leaves
stuff, steep + store
is 48 pages, 10 x 8 inches so it fits easily in a bag
costs a good deal less than it does to attend a workshop and you can read it in the bath.
tis the season of twinkling lights and of giving
and i am well content
in a place that is dear to my heart
so
i am announcing a give-away to kindly followers of this blog
you have until December 13
to comment telling me what you would most like to read about here
and share this post via your blog [if you have one] or some other social medium [if you participate in such things]
i will write your names on windfallen eucalyptus leaves
toss them in the air
and ask Miss Martha to choose one at random
i think she will like that game
a similar give-away is running on FaceBook
that gives you two chances!
today i was planning to write about what i'd been up to this week
that i needed to make a new scarf [gave the last one away to my uncle who drove from Colorado and back again to visit with me on the weekend]
with the added confession that i was missing the fragrance of home so much
that i actually went and bought some bunches of eucalyptus to play with [sound of hand being firmly smacked]
and that i then quite unexpectedly found a friend here in Portland
whilst wandering the Hoyt Arboretum [with aforementioned uncle]
it's a snow gum and so is an excellent choice for its location [in the wintergarden]
except that it may get bigger in this protected locality than at home in the Australian Alps
[where it would be clinging to a hillside and subject to horizontal ice storms]
and crowd out its neighbours
Eucalyptus pauciflora : snow gum
that it is getting cooler by the day
and so some armies were needed to keep my gathering paws warm
prints from windfall snowgum leaves
and the other side
note : the slender leaf prints are quite a different colour to those on the SilkyMerino shown in the photo at the very top. this is because the sleeves were snipped from a sweater that had been washed several times and thus had been premordanted with a sodium-rich substance
i was also going to mention that there are easier ways of straining bananas
than putting them through a pillowcase
the straining part is fine
it's the washing of the pillowcase that is the tedious part.
bananas have fine stickability and if even minute parts are left attached are almost impossible to dislodge once dry
wandering in the Japanese Garden again yesterday
i betook myself to the small shop there and leafed through a few books
one devoted to furoshiki offered a the perfect answer
reminding me that a piece of cloth can be used to hold all sorts of things
so i tied a piece of cloth to the handles of the strainer by the ears
because there were too many bananas to stuff into a sock
it does look a little as though i have just regurgitated my porridge
but more of that later
continuing my stroll i found an exquisite pond
in which leaves and fir needles were floating
here's a closer look
and then when you take the colour away
it looks curiously like a fusion between the hands of Dorothy Caldwell and Christine Mauersberger
which is kind of sweet, because i first met Christine when we both took Dorothy Caldwell's class in Ohio back in 2009
which was around about the time, or a little after, that i remember receiving a number of emails from Cassandra Tondro with questions about various processes described in my book Eco Colour
so it was a bit surprising to read in Handeye today her description of the ecoprint idea as coming to her from the pavements. maybe she had indeed previously discovered the technique that way [zeitgeist and all that], but if so she didn't mention it in the correspondence.
Christine kindly said a few words which provoked a comment on her blog suggesting that i in turn had purloined the technique from Karen Diadick Casselman. actually, i didn't.
to set the record straight :
Karen Diadick Casselman's dyeing in
bundles that i experienced [as her assistant] at the time she visited Australia in 1998
involved wrapping leaves and cloth together with a range of what i
consider to be toxic mordants [as well as household substances such as
cleaning sprays and perfumes]. She also did some very fine work with
lichens and barbed wire.
We corresponded for a long time and I've always squirmed when people
describe my work as 'eco-dye' because Karen coined that particular
phrase and it really belongs to her.
The descriptor 'ecoprint' came into use through my thesis work with
eucalyptus as i considered at the time that being able to test the
leaves for dye potential by steaming a leaf in a bundle for a short
while as opposed to the energy-hungry process of boiling out the leaves
for an hour and then heating the cloth in the resultant liquid for an
hour [where the dye colour was going to be changed by the water quality
anyway] to see what the colour might be [was more sustainable].
But I suppose i should have called it
Latvian-Easter-Egg-Dyeing-But-On-Cloth which is where i got the idea
from myself [before I met Karen]. My family has been dyeing eggs that
way for at least 150 years [that's as far back as the
handed-down-memories go] and so have many other European folk. that would be the truest attribution. except it's a bit of a mouthful.
and as for printing on paper, my great-aunt, Master Bookbinder Ilse Schwerdtfeger was doing that back in the 1930s except that unlike her great-niece, she used pressure and time [and a few "eye-of-newt" mordants] whereas i use a cauldron. i wrote about her work in IAPMA Bulletin 52
and now if you've read this far you deserve a gold star. and what i had been planning to mention somewhere along the line and now comes just as you're dropping off is the hot news that Christine Mauersberger has recently been confirmed as teaching down-under next year at the Geelong Textile Retreat, that splendid annual event organised by Janet de Boer and her tireless team and TAFTA
the event also features other luminaries including Dorothy Caldwell and Sandra Brownlee [but i think their classes are already full]
and before you leap to the comment box and tell me to get back in mine...i'm not criticising Ms Tondro. i just found it curious that the appellation 'ecoprint', as well as the process should serendipitously appear from the pavements.
where i called in on my journey because the nice woman at the coffee shop down by the cannery dock makes the best ever double shot moccha frappes, except that it was Sunday and her day off [and who shall blame her, it was a glorious day] and the coffee shop was closed
anyway
on pages 14 + 15 there is good advice
i'm glad i bought it even if i did pay rather more over the counter
We corresponded for a long time and I've always squirmed when people describe my work as 'eco-dye' because Karen coined that particular phrase and it really belongs to her.
The descriptor 'ecoprint' came into use through my thesis work with eucalyptus as i considered at the time that being able to test the leaves for dye potential by steaming a leaf in a bundle for a short while as opposed to the energy-hungry process of boiling out the leaves for an hour and then heating the cloth in the resultant liquid for an hour [where the dye colour was going to be changed by the water quality anyway] to see what the colour might be [was more sustainable].
But I suppose i should have called it Latvian-Easter-Egg-Dyeing-But-On-Cloth which is where i got the idea from myself [before I met Karen]. My family has been dyeing eggs that way for at least 150 years [that's as far back as the handed-down-memories go] and so have many other European folk.
that would be the truest attribution. except it's a bit of a mouthful.