Indigo and Logwood
I have been dyeing more scarves, a silk/cotton blend from India, using natural dyes.
A lot of Indigo and some Logwood.
Category Archives: Textile Work
I have been dyeing more scarves, a silk/cotton blend from India, using natural dyes.
A lot of Indigo and some Logwood.
Seasons of My Garden
My garden is a constant source of inspiration, both visually and metaphorically. I am fascinated at observing the seasonal changes, from the soft, hopeful greens of tender shoots emerging in spring, through the vivid colours and overgrown exuberance of summer and early fall, to the stillness and melancholy of muted browns and purples in the late fall and winter garden. As I experience the aging process of my own body and am confronted with the death and loss of family and friends, the natural cycle of death and rebirth that I witness in my garden seems a surprising source of solace and comfort.
This series of dresses is my attempt to evoke the various moods and emotions of the changing seasons of my garden.
Transparent Silks
I love the ethereal, transparent qualities of these Indian silks.
I’ve used Indigo, Persimmon and Logwood natural dyes, followed by machine embroidery.
More Scarves with Natural Dyes and Shibori
I’ve been working with silk from India, experimenting with combinations of Indigo, Persimmon, Rust, Logwood and Pomegranate natural dyes and various Shibori techniques.
Indigo/Shibori/Silk
This Indigo/Shibori/Silk Scarf is a good example of a few of the reasons why I fell madly in love with “Textile Arts”.
Silk is definitely my fabric of choice. The transformation by silk worms of mulberry leaves into the delicate gossamer yet amazingly strong threads of silk is magical.
Indigo is most certainly the queen of natural dyes. How can you not be in awe at watching the change in colours of fabric that has just been removed from an indigo vat change slowly from greens to those gorgeous blues? Pure alchemy!
Silk gauze
I’ve started working with silk gauze. Dyeing it. Sewing it. Learning how to manipulate it. The silk gauze is so fragile it feels like working with air. The transparency and luminosity is wonderful.
In October I took a course at Maiwa from Kyoko Ueda from Japan who taught me how to begin to work with this amazing fabric.
Jamdani Dyed with Indigo and Rust
Jamdani Silk Dyed with Indigo and Rust
Silk Jamdani dyed with Indigo and Rust.
This is a piece of silk Jamdani fabric that I brought back from Calcutta last February. Jamdani weaving is found in Bengal and Bangladesh. It is a supplementary weft technique of weaving, somewhat similar to tapestry. The standard weft creates a fine, sheer fabric while the supplementary weft with thicker threads, in this case metallic red and gold threads, adds the pattern. Each supplementary weft motif is added separately by hand by interlacing the weft threads into the warp with fine bamboo sticks using individual spools of thread. The traditional art of weaving Jamdani has been declared by Unesco as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Indigo
During my recent trip to India I bought a number of exquisite silk scarves, mostly from Calcutta and Bengal. I’ve dyed them with Indigo plus a bit of Iron Rust and Lac.
I made an organic Indigo vat using rotting bananas as the reducing agent.
Michel Garcia’s recipe. It works well!
Persimmon
Lately I have been working with Japanese Persimmon Dye. It produces a gorgeous chestnut brown that combines beautifully with Indigo.
Persimmon Dye involves a lengthly process to achieve the darkest colours. The dye is painted onto the fabric and left to bake in the sun. During the first day in the sun the fabric turns a very pale pinky brown. With each succeeding dye and sun exposure the fabric becomes increasingly darker.
More Scarves
I’ve been dyeing more scarves using a combination of logwood and pomegranate natural dyes on silk/rayon devoré and a silk/cotton blend made in India.
Some of the scarves are now for sale at Circle Craft on Granville Island in Vancouver
Silk Scarves with Natural Dyes
I have been dyeing a series of silk scarves with combinations of Indigo, Rust and Blood Root/Sanguineria Canadensis.
DETAILS
Indigo
I spent an amazing 10 days in May at Bryan Whitehead’s in Fujino, Japan. japanesetextileworkshops.blogspot.ca
During my stay with Bryan we visited the workshop of Noguchi san, a Katazome master in Tokyo, who hand prints lengths of indigo fabric for kimonos (13 metres X 36 centimetres). He uses traditional stencils cut from mulberry paper, hand prints a rice paste resist onto the fabric and then dyes the fabric in indigo vats. Pure magic!
Embroidery: Dappled Things
This embroidery sampler is based on a drawing I made in my garden. It was inspired by the poem “Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
Práise hím.
Dreaming on a Summer’s Day
Image
Silk Fusion and Embroidery
One of my favourite summer pastimes is lying under a tree, looking up through a canopy of leaves at a blue summer sky dotted with a few fluffy white clouds. In this work I want to evoke a sensation of dreaming, of drifting and weightlessness- the feeling that you are looking up through the leaves at the clouds- but also that you are floating in the clouds looking back down at yourself. I combined the silk fusion technique with actual leaves from my garden. It seems strangely fitting that each silk mawata square is the product of one cocoon produced by one silkworm from the leaves of the mulberry tree. My palette of lemon yellows and turquoise blues is an attempt to capture the sensation of the shimmering and reflections of the leaves, light, sky, air and clouds.
Fuzzy Orifices~Spring
I’m working on a series of “Fuzzy Orifices”, that will combine crocheted flowers with knitted shapes that evoke plant forms, body parts and organic growth.
Fuzzy Orifices~Spring depicts the exuberance of forms springing to life- of parts emerging from and transforming into other shapes. It contains a mixture of colours, bubble gum pinks and bright reds suggesting the body, combined with the darker greens, browns and blacks of the natural world.
The piece is meant to be slightly critical but also playful, something of an ironic commentary on crocheted granny squares, which have always seemed to me to be a bit too fussy and cute. I want the effect to be a little grotesque and funny at the same time.
My first Fuzzy Orifices. From the spring of 2012.
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