How did we both get so skinny recently? It seems all we did was eat! Your Mom is going to have to fatten you up with some good French country cooking.
Living in a small mountain village just outside of Tokyo, I grow a crop of indigo every year and process the leaves into dye using traditional methods. I also breed silk moths, raise the silkworms and then reel/spin the silk from the cocoons. The silk is then dyed with natural dyes and finally woven on traditional Japanese looms. I run several ten-day live-in workshops a year at the old farmhouse here in Japan focusing on the Japanese use of indigo. Contact me for information.
Sunday, 20 May 2012
Last MInute Shibori for France.
Guillaume , thank you for being such a great help these past months. We were harvesting tea and Guillaume looked anxious checking the time...."Bryan I won't have time to indigo dye my last shibori if I don't go now!" He came as a WOOFER and stayed at the house off and on for the past six months doing carpentry work, cutting bamboo, cleaning fields and finally harvesting tea. He heads back to France tomorrow morning with some really original and cool shibori presents for his family and mementos for himself.
Good luck Guillaume, hope it all goes well for your future...
ReplyDeleteLike your tea plants, Bryan. After a long search of some years bought a little tiny one and kept it growing to a height of 15 cm, but it didn't survive the central heating during wintertime when we moved :(
ReplyDeleteGreetings from far away while drinking a cup of Japanese tea
Thoma
lovely indigo cloth. i didn't know you harvested your own tea.jealous :)
ReplyDeletehave had some experience with woofers while volunteering at bittersweet farm, a local organic farm. i was very impressed with the folks i met and worked with.
ReplyDeleteI have had a few Woofers find me and they have been nothing but a pleasure to have at the house. Young and fresh and hard working. I plan to actively find a few this fall. The bamboo forest up behind the house needs a few weeks of work. Cutting up the half fallen over ones and cutting down the older scrappy ones to make room for some young bamboo. The creak could use a few days of cleaning up...and then a few tea terraces...and then the barn could use another cleaning....The new rooms upstairs might come in very handy. The woofers can experience life in an old village to boot. A double win for both of us.
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