Madder and the Winter Down Time

New Years Eve was very quiet at the house. The past few weeks of the winter slow down have been heaven.

Anneke arrived a few days with a suitcase full of the precious stuff. A big bottle of Pernod. A lot of chocolate.  I had to clean the fridge spotlessly and dedicate a special drawer to the mountain of cheese from Amsterdam and Italy. Now that is the way to start a good new year. Hiro baked away in the new oven and we are all suffering from lasagne hangovers. The dogs are walked and curled up in their respective chairs. Such domesticity.

Celebrating Christmas is a bit of a stretch in Japan. It is better to keep it simple. Hiro roasted a chicken in the new oven. Kamei san joined us for a quiet and delicious Christmas dinner. Then we watched, 'A Charlie Brown Christmas',  'How the Grinch Stole Christmas' and a dozen versions of, 'Do You Hear What I Hear?' on youtube. A midnight-minus-five-degree-dog-walk and soon visions of sugarplums were dancing in our heads. 

The reds from dyeing with madder were the only thing resembling Christmas decorations in the house this year.

After comparing Japanese Madder, European Madder and Indian Madder the verdict is in: 

Indian madder makers the most beautiful deep reds.

After using the dried roots, fresh roots, powdered and finely chopped the verdict is in:

Finally chopped is easier to use and you seem to get every last drop of pigment out of the roots.

The best technique for boiling down the madder is to make a fine woven and strong cotton bag and place the madder in that and put that in the boiling water. It is physically exhausting and dangerous to be pouring boiling water through fine cheesecloth over and over. It is also messy. The madder does double in size when it is boiled so don't fill the bag. It will explode. I used to use a silk bag but it just absorbed a lot of the pigment. After using it for years it was a gorgeous blood red before I retired it and used the silk as a lining for some project. Cotton will not absorb much of the madder pigment.

To get dark reds with aluminum you do have to mordant and dye mordant and dye a few times. It is not necessary to dry between dyes.  I was mordanting at 5% weight of dry yarn.

I learned to warp twenty years ago on a large Japanese wooden warping drum from the early 20th century. I had two at the house but they never ran smoothly. Kids love to spin these things full throttle and they get broken easily. I found one in almost perfect condition in an attic of an old farmhouse in a neighbouring village a few weeks back. It took a few days to polish up and oil and repair and now it runs perfectly. The first project to get warped is a silk kimono obi. It can warp eight threads at a time. One rotation in 3.5 meters. The frame can warp about 70 meters evenly. How clever is this thing?  You can warp 1200 threads in less than two hours.

I spent New Years Eve cutting new stencils for the paper linen sock tube project. I sewed together three layers of papers so three stencils get cut at the same time. The wave patterns with something floating down them from a second stencil is going to be the motif for a few years. I am generally too busy to think. This was an easy decision and keeps the general flow of work more or less centred for a while.

Best for the coming year.

Bryan

Another Unknown Shibori

Ted came by from California and we had another short but sweet visit. Looking at a lot of those old Motohiko Katano shibori cards we noticed that quite a few had grey tones. He had used soot and soy milk to form a polymer and adhere the grey. The soot mixture seeps deeper into the folds of the shibori resulting in a grey halo between the blue and the white. The folding was not hard to figure out. Ted quickly got the extra middle fold. The size of the resists needs just a little tweaking to get the overall rhythm perfect. The grey bleed was sublime. Ted, we need a few weeks to simply focus on these grey bleeds. You come teach me.

Ann left today. She has been here for a few months. Quietly working on shibori and zeroing in on the really beautiful fine ones.  She quickly put our research to use and came up with this…

You can see the difference of the patterns on the back and front and how the indigo bleeds through to the other side.

The next step will be sit and stare at this for a few hours and mentally collapse the folds in a new way that comes  out of our own head. The centres of the squares can be played with. The depth of the stitches and the tightness of the pull and tie and the amount of manipulation in the indigo can make it more meaningful. The fabric can be different and perhaps another dye can be bled in. It then won't be just a copy of his work. This was the great thing about Katano as a shibori craftsman. He took a technique and sort of exploded it like John Coltrane did with, 'My Favorite Things.'

This reminds me of Cyndi doing Carey in front of Joni Mitchell. She respects the song and honours it so tenderly. That wasn't the time to explode it. She brings tears to my eyes every time I watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hfw-NCqpB8

I suppose this is something to think about when approaching shibori. You have a precious tradition that should be preserved but you can easily see the work produced in Arimatsu is God awful. Much of the innovation has production time and sale price written between each miserable stitch and resist. How do you respect it, find the essence then transpose the key into something you can sing with?

Process Unknown Shibori

In a few old shibori books there is the inviting phrase, 'Process unknown' written under  photographs of  pieces of Jacqueline Kennedy indigo. (Mysterious and completely unaccessible.) Liza and I tried to demystify one of those pieces a few years back. We managed to get close but the enthusiasm waned after a few failures. Ann and I picked up the thread a week back and tried to unravel the techniques of  a few old Motohiko Katano indigo dyed pieces found on postcards.

We struggled to get our linear brains to warp and see the thing three dimensionally and figure out the stitching and pulling sequences. Like an obvious but tricky chord progression, there were a few, "you gotta be kidding, he wouldn't have gone to that much trouble" moments.

Here are three related, 'process unknown' shibori techniques by Katano Motohiko. I am sure someone has figured out how he did them but the techniques are not in any of the shibori bibles I have run into.

The one on the left was challenge number one.

The first thing was to get out brains to flip right and see the collapsing principals. Bright coloured markers helped. Then a more refined gridding out.

The front stitched in white.

The back stitched in black.

The black and white threads pulled and tied.

The first piece was dyed without much manipulation under the surface of the indigo.

And the second piece dyed more carefully with opening action both under the surface of the indigo and  while oxidizing. 

Pretty amazing. More to come.

Tenue de Nimes Article

A shop in Amsterdam is selling some of the stuff I made on the sock knitter and dyed with indigo and persimmon last summer. To promote me they asked me ten questions for the stores 5th anniversary printed magazine edition. I sort of mashed together the notes from the Maiwa speech. I never have written anything that personal on here before. I am Aquarius...we sort of forget that pasts exist.
Here goes lazy blogging with a link to something unedited. http://issuu.com/nimes/docs/journal_no09_issuu#embed

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.

---

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.