Japanese Indigo Vat In Vancouver

I gave a lecture at the Maiwa Textile Symposium a month back. It was to be on how I came to be a silk farmer in this mountain village in Japan. I've lived through it and haven't found it that entertaining and wonder why any one else would want to hear about it. Weeding mulberry fields under the scorching sun, cleaning up silkworm waste and dealing with neighbours who still have one foot in hunter gatherer and the other in survival farming for twenty years lost it's novelty about 19 years back.  I had written the lecture out and practiced it while driving back and forth the studio in Atsugi for a month. Being here in Japan and having never really given a lecture where people had actually paid to hear me speak made the whole thing hard to visualize.  Sort of like facing a firing squad. The countdown was agonizing and I comforted myself that it would be over before I knew it.

When I got to Vancouver and looked at the venue and watched John Gillows give his lecture there a week before mine was due, I panicked and started re-organizing it. This is always a bad move. The speech and your  head  get terribly mixed up. 

I don't panic but I go blank. I had bought a new iPad and organized silk farming and indigo pictures into neat little albums. The photos would pull me through if I had a mental hardware crash. I would simply say things like, 'this is a mature silkworm before making a cocoon', and thumb through photos and finish up answering a few questions and quickly head for a cold beer. 

Thirty minutes to stage time and I went blank. I probably couldn't remember my name if asked.

I went to the woody west coast handicapped washroom and tried to get the new order of the lecture straight and to wash my face in cold water to get some kind of expression on it. I peeked out to see if I recognized any faces in the crowd. I saw the woman whom I had ordered a silver earring from a few days before and she motioned me over and told me she had finished it.  I was on in two minutes but invited her into the woody washroom to put it in my ear and close it with pliers. This was going well and we were having a good laugh as someone pounded on the door and told me that the projector wasn't working and I would have no pictures. I slid open the door to see five pairs of the lecture staff's eyes meet.....ours. And five pair of eyes roll up in unison. 

I shivered in dread and mumbled that I would explain later. I heard a snicker...

Jeeeesh.

Nightmare number two...the projector really wasn't working. No pictures. Every third sentence introduced a photograph. So one third of my speech lead no where. I thought I might point to the blank screen and say things like, "This is supposed to be a picture of silkworm pupae minutes before the moth emerges". I was no longer worrying about going on stage with blank expression. Desperation and embarrassment are easy enough to read. 

During the question and answer part at the end of the lecture some one remarked that I had started to talk about the influence of Buddhism on Japanese textiles and had suddenly stopped mid-sentence. I jokingly replied that I had noticed five people in the front row yawn when I had said that and decided to change trajectory. This was partially true. I realized mid-sentence that the album with the pictures wasn't going to open and therefore I wasn't going to let the pictures do the  talking.

I went on with the lecture. Sympathy filled the air and I bumbled through with bad jokes.  Pity laughter echoed.  The tech man fumbled beside me and part way through the lecture unrelated photos from my iPad came up on the screen behind me. 

On the iPad screen before me there was a recent selfie with my shirt off showing off a new tattoo on my less than muscular chest and a ridiculous look on my face. There is a god, and whatever it is was merciful and the selfie did not go up on the big screen. I had altogether panicked in front of the audience though. There was plenty of laughter and someone actually shouted to show the tattoo. (Once again God was merciful and I didn't show it.) This was supposed to be a respectable textile symposium. I muddled through the lecture and realized at the end I had told a few too many bawdy stories....at the textile symposium.  (The Japanese guy who had tried to dye his equipment indigo blue from behind and fell into the vat bottom first and couldn't get out.) 

I gave three workshops at the symposium as well. The first was on Japanese indigo. Against my better judgement I had agreed to make a Japanese fermentation indigo vat using sukumo (composted Japanese indigo). There are too many small things to worry about and too much can go wrong so far from home. I arrived in Vancouver a week early to get these going. They really didn't look as if they were going to bloom in time so Charlotte and Anne helped me get a fruit indigo vat, a madder indigo vat, going just in case. The God of Fermentation graced the vats at the last minute and all went well. 

The Japanese Indigo two-day workshop was great. But not how I had expected it to go. There were sixteen participants. One woman had been growing indigo for twenty two years, (two years longer than me) and several other participants had never even seen an indigo vat. How do you teach a group with such a diverse background? 

I played group aikido and let them teach each other. There was a huge volume of information and personal stories of indigo successes and failures and insights exchanged and I was more a mediator with a lot of experience than the teacher. Indigo is very very fickle. There are several ways of preparing a vat and they differ and are similar to varying degrees. It was an exhausting two days but I believe everyone left somehow richer in indigo knowledge. I was satisfied.

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Exhibition at Diana Sanderson's Silk Weaving Studio in Vancouver.

I went to Vancouver for a month to have a small exhibition of some recent work at my friend Diana's gallery.

 Busy with carpentry work and workshops and teaching, there is never the time for creative work like the good old days. Having the exhibition made me focus on a practical use for the knits from the old knitting machines. The thread is linen paper thread knit on the sock knitter and then stencilled dyed with indigo and persimmon dye. They were well received and it always feels good to have people truly interested in what you make. 

I collected hundreds of old Japanese tenugui towels and painstakingly dyed them every sunny summer morning in the persimmon tannin. I sewed them together to remotely resemble old Buddhist Kessas. A friend made the boxes for each individual piece. They are humorous and funky. I hope Gale and friends  wear them for years, and leave them over the back of a chair for you guests to enjoy on chilly evenings by a campfire.

I've never been interested in showing my work outside the house. Any exhibition I've had somehow just happened for some other reason. Always someone else's idea and I end up thinking...'What am I doing this for?" I guess it is for amusements sake. 

Watching customers come into the gallery and listening to their conversations is interesting. Of course you can hear some truly idiotic comments and sort of fantasize about a trap door that would drop them directly into the ocean below.  The comments that make you fear for the future of humanity and cringe at the contracted consciousness of a strutting mean-eyed mother giving shopping advice to her daughter, "In a few years you can start to buy handmade scarves but you should always  think of them as an investment in your future."

But for the most part, I met warm and wonderful clear-eyed expansive people with heart-melting smiles and kind comments. I came back from Vancouver with a fuzzy warm feeling for all the people I met at the exhibition and workshops and around the city. I had time to strike up conversations everywhere I went. Sadly, I rarely have time in Japan to do that. 

It was great to meet up with dear old friends. Elizabeth and I lived under the same roof and studied painting together 20 years ago in Japan. To sit for a few hours with beer and catch up on all that life has thrown at us and we've enjoyed. Magical. Thank you all for dropping by the exhibition.

Ikebana Class for Autumn Workshop

Today Hiro taught the autumn workshop students ikebana upstairs.  I was hanging around watching how each person approached the work. Earlier in the day I had primed everyone with a few books on the subject.  I was almost moved to tears a few times watching how everyone concentrated so earnestly and almost childlike at a new world on the table in front of them.
An autumn walk to the local mountain udon shop was dreamlike. We were each in our own world and at the same time enjoying our time together. A few hours later everyone gave Japanese flower arranging a try. I could almost hear the newly configured gears slip into place with trepidation oiled with good faith.

William, Justin, Lauren, Dani, Makoto, Jen, Ann, Kathy and Hiro at the noodle shop for lunch. So fresh, talented and so beautiful..... thank you for being here.

Visiting Old Friends.

I hadn't really had a day off since the tsunami two and a half years ago. It had been non-stop work on the house and the new studio and workshops. It was heaven to go to Canada and have time walk and collect my thoughts as well as give my brain and body a break. The Maiwa workshops were a pleasure to teach.

Unfortunately, the flight back u-turned over the Pacific ocean and returned to Vancouver due to technical problems. After changing planes and flying back over to Japan....what seemed like three hundred hours in a stuffy plane, I got a bad airplane cold. Grrrrrr. Dreaded antibiotics seem to have made short work of it. I have guests arriving in a few days and I am looking forward to jumping into that with clear sinuses.

I met Jean and we had a blast in Victoria. As I snooped around her treasure-filled house I found a particular treasure made by a mutual blog friend. Velma.....what beautiful work. It looked sublime in the west coast sunrise.

Jean and I drank beer, hung around the kitchen table, smiled and looked around her weaving studio, walked around old graveyards, (Those always clear my head and work wonders for setting priorities.) went for the best Greek food ever. Of course she had to floor that Toyota to get me on the ferry to Saltspring Island because we didn't keep an eye on the clock but gabbed and gabbed and looked at all her great books.  Hope to see you in 2015 Jean.

bryan

Maiwa lecture

I am in Vancover. The first time I've spent any time here in 25 years.

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Cocoon Day with Karin

Karin's approach to indigo is different from mine. She is a note taker. A careful planner.   Occasionally frustrated by the fickleness of indigo and the huge downpour of cultural and technical information her Scorpio intelligence boxed it all up for future reference. With one eyebrow raised and a warm slow smile interspersed with a wince and thoughtfully pursed lips, she surveyed a months worth of work as she packed up in preparation for her trip to Kyoto yesterday.

Indigo and it's friends shibori and stencil dyeing to take time. Time.... to deeply understand the history and potentials and limitations of indigo itself and the Japanese techniques that developed with indigo over a long history.
I have no doubt that her Scorpio spirit will have it all mastered in a few years. I can see that indigo and the peripherals are her calling.

Today we looked at silk. She had never seen a cocoon before.

I showed her several techniques of how to reel and make different silk threads and options for expanding those methods to make even more varieties.

She already had some very good shibori techniques in her repertoire. 

I believe that this work is the genten from which many more will spring. 

Indigo Knits

I have been working with my 1950's sock knitter for almost a year now. I took off the heel function and have been knitting tubes. Cashmere, wool, cotton, silk and linen. Looking for something that felt right. Not just texture wise but something I would want to work with. (Jean, I should have listened to you from the start. Linen is magic. Indigo dyed linen is sublime.)

The machine knits two thin linen threads and a cotton thread beautifully. 70% linen and 30% cotton. I take the tubes and stencil dye on them. I will be having an exhibition in Vancouver in October. It has been a long time since I spent time near the ocean.Waves and more waves.  Some of them are Edo period (mid 1800's). They are easy to find at antique markets and can be re-lacquered and netted and used. I drew and cut out some others, seaweed and drooping branches over the water. After dyeing the tubes in indigo ten and sometimes twenty times in indigo, the paste is removed and I re-stencil a different pattern on the linen. Then the tubes are dyed seven times in persimmon tannin. Placed in the sun every morning to absorb the UV rays and turn a crisp brown. The second pasting is removed and the tubes are cut up and sewn  back up on my old industrial overlocker.