Thank you all for your kind words

On Friday I was having a regular weaving indigo open house workshop at my house. The lights dimmed and flashed and went out. I immediately sensed the worse as I know our town's power is supplied by a nuclear power plant in Fukushima. The house then started to roll more than actually shake. I've been through many earthquakes here and this one felt different. Not in size as the epicenter was far north but in quality. I quickly got my three students outside and away from the house. (Thank you Takeshima san for having the presence of mind to switch off the kerosene heater.) Outside the ground rolled and my tea field across the valley actually warped before my eyes.

The power was off for 12 hours. The trains were down and my students stranded in my town. Thank you Ogata san for cheerfully cooking and keeping us as light hearted as possible as news filtered in. We all have friend's and family in the area of the epicenter and in true Japanese form they remained polite and calm.

Now we have the specter of nuclear meltdown only several hundred km away. Not the lightest hearted weekend I've spent. The unmeasurable misery and pain happening only several hours north keeps my own inconvenience in perspective. Just in case, I decided to take a short trip south last night on a late local train. The wind would blow the radioactive cloud out to sea but there is the chance that it could come over my place. I am open to most new experiences but i will pass on this. So I am holed up in a crummy hotel in the Japanese Alps trying to keep up on the unfolding events taking place at the nuclear facilities. This particular facility has had it's management replaced before for faking documents on safety reports. This coupled with a 40 year old 15 cm metal casing holding in all that radiation...as my good friend Luc would say, "Shaitza Pooch"

Kato Ko

Ko san and digging akane (madder) in his mulberry field.


I wrote this blog just a few days before the tsunami and nuclear meltdown. There was enough bad news going around so it has sat in my blog edit pile for these past months.

I am very grateful to Minako and Ko Kato who live in a village on the other side of my town. 17 years ago I showed up at their front door and in poor Japanese I asked to see the silk kimono rolls she wove from the silk her family produces. Minako took me to their old clay storehouse and I watched as she opened some drawers and took out some hand woven rolls of naturally dyed hand spun and reeled silk. I took a good look at them and stood up straight and thanked her. In less than one minute the rest of my life had been decided. I was going to learn the processes and make my own silk and weave it. I needed to speak Japanese. I hit the textbooks and cassette tapes and in five months I was back on their doorstep asking them to teach me (in a more advanced state of broken Japanese) all about silk farming, thread making, old weaving looms and tools .

We became good friends over the years. I did need basic Japanese to communicate but our relationship built on years and years of non-verbal communication. Spending hundreds of hours threading and warping looms, digging dyestuffs and sharing time enjoying the lengthy processes brought us close together.

Sadly, Ko passed away last week at 93. The family called and I went over to their house and helped prepare for the funeral. In the country they still bring the body back to the house for a few days. He looked peaceful sleeping on his futon dressed in a white cotton kimono.

Yesterday the buddhist priest came and it was time to take him away to the crematorium. The family members and friends help dress him and prepare him for the seven day journey to the next world. He needs some cute white silk shoes. Some white silk leg protectors to keep the mud off his legs. A bag around is neck with six coins to pay for the ferryboat to the other side. A bag in case he receives any presents along the way. A walking stick because the path is hard. Some straw sandals to walk in. (The ties are cut though in case his ghost decides to come back thus making it impossible to really walk in them.) The coffin was filled with things he liked. Some sake. Some books.

Minako asked me to help her cover him with a beautiful indigo dyed kimono she had woven for him many years ago. She said to him, " Remember this one old guy? You raised the silk cocoons and I wove this for you. It is for you."

Then the coffin was filled with flowers and we drove to the crematorium. It takes about an hour to finish there. The temperature is kept quite low so that the ancient tradition of loved ones picking up the bones together with chopsticks can continue.

He taught me many things about mulberry cultivation and silk farming. I spent many afternoons listening to his stories of the war and the self sufficient ways of the old days. ( He would set a fish trap on the way to elementary school and bring the fish back home after school for the family to eat.) I suppose one bond between us was that the three of us knew very well that life in that simpler time was far more sophisticated and enjoyable. I miss him.

Workshop in Europe

The University of Liechtenstein's Architecture and Economics departments give their undergraduate and graduate students a chance to participate in a week-long course not related to their fields of study once a year. (Liechtenstein is a small Principality sandwiched between Austria and Switzerland. The Prince lives with his family in a castle above the main town.) There were ten other guest workshop leaders. A shoe maker, toy designer, a ceramist , furniture designer, print maker/archiver, and other very talented cool designers from other European countries taught. I was short on concept and words and we basically got straight to work indigo dying. The students were all exceptionally creative and it was pure pleasure to see what great ideas they came up with. Scarves, work-belts and book covers were obligatory and then they brought in their old clothes to dye with indigo. It was simply a wonderful time. I want to thank the students and other workshop leaders and the University folks for a very memorable time.

Katagami in St Gallen

I was in St Gallen, Switzerland last week and visited the textile museum there. St Gallen was a textile production center in Europe and like most other textile producing areas the industry has been 100% gutted because of imports from countries where labor is a fraction of the cost. Out of nostalgia or some sense of historic duty a museum is created. I've visited a few over the years in the Alp countries. Usually somewhat depressing this one wasn't much different. Rooms of heartbreaking beautiful old textiles. Lace and clever printing techniques etc. and then the obligatory area for contemporary works. Seeing the traditional clothing and other textiles of aristocrats and farmers and textiles from other parts of the world. I can't help but feel we dress so poorly in the 21st century. (As I sit typing fully outfitted in mass made 'Made in Laborcheaperia'.)

I had heard that the textile library at the museum had the best collection of Edo period Japanese katazome patterns in the world. For 40 Swiss Francs you can use the library and the librarian is generous and lets you photograph. They had several thousand samples and it was possible to get through about a thousand of them in a few hours. Here are a few that caught our imagination.

You can purchase antique linen at markets in Vienna and in Swiss towns. Barbara and I are thinking about having an exhibition using Japanese indigo stencil techniques on antique Alps linen in some potentially treacherous fashion. It will hard to navigate through the steep mountain ridges of design to avoid falling into the Woodstock or the Kleenex Box-Cover gorges on either side while avoiding the sheer cliffs of humorless-culture-hybrid-textile-art.

Primitive Rope Making

Someone had cut down a shuro tree and taken it to the local sawmill to have it processed. The shredded type bark looked as if it would make a good lesson in beauty/utility. Sure enough, Ogata san knew how to make a strong rope and immediately set about showing the other students how to. We couldn't find her 'off' switch and she quickly used up everyone else's supply of shred. Her masterpiece is now hung in the kitchen on the art object wall.

Indigo Reduction

Indigo dying is tricky.
There are some tribes in Africa that seem to be doing it the no-nonsense way. They take the indigo leaves and pound the pigment directly into the cloth with a small club. This is the smart way to avoid the hassle of removing the oxygen from the dying liquid either chemically of through fermenting. If one of the oxygen molecules in the pigment chemical equation is not removed the indigo will not stick to the cloth.

A fermentation type vat gone wrong is the foulest thing that can happen to a natural dyer. Putrid gas. And things can go wrong very quickly. You start with the vat only one tenth full of high pH water from either seeping ash or with slaked lime. Each day you add a bucket or so. When the indigo compost starts to ferment you add a cup of sugar source to just bring the good bacteria over the edge and to bloom. Too early and it burns out without reaching a kind of critical mass and too late it goes bad. (The whole process is kind of sexy come to think of it.) One time I was stupid enough to add a cup of sugar dissolved in tap water that contained chlorine. I should only use water from the stream next to the house.
In an hour the sharp healthy ammonia smell turned to putrid rotten swamp gunk. It could be salvaged with a chemical reduction agent. The color was fine but the smell was foul.

The recent stink was simply caused by a build up of slaked lime and hydro-sulphate reduction agent building up at the bottom of the vat. The hot summer weather starting it stinking and the smell in whatever form it took just couldn't be eliminated.

Like Velma said, the smell in the dyed clothing can be gotten rid of in one hot water wash.

The indigo bubbles on the surface of the indigo tell you the condition of the vat. If they are purple and oily looking there is enough actual pigment in the water. If they are clear and light blue and slightly frothy you need to add pigment. If the liquid just under the surface is not yellow green that is telling you that there is too much oxygen in the vat and needs to be removed.

If you get to know the sound of a stick hitting the inside wall of the vat you can quickly judge the pH level. A low 'thung' means a low pH. A higher 'ting' means the pH is about 12 where it should be. It takes a few years to get really good at reading the signs in the bubbles and the smell. It starts to get like palm reading when you notice lines and milkiness etc and other finer nuances and their meanings as you understand the vat over years.

Indigo dyed good are often attributed with keeping insects and snakes away, stopping athletes foot, and generally being good for you. I wonder.... I've gotten bitten many times while working at the dye vat and a somewhat doubt the poisonous mamushi around my place could care less what I am wearing. If I really annoyed them I'm sure they woud bite no matter what.

I do think that the bacteria on newly dyed indigo clothes from a pure natural fermentation vat might be healthy but I doubt the indigo pigment has any health benifits.

The color itself is another story. As a natural dye it is gentle to look at and vibrates at a pure frequency. This is good for anyone. Pure and simple.

Stinking Indigo Vat at my Door

It was time to get rid of the old liquid and clean up the ceramic vat and the blue stained walls around it. For the past three years indigo pigment and slaked lime and hydro sulphate were added as necessary week after week. These eventually build up at the bottom of the vat. Eventually it starts to reek something fierce. It dyes as usual but the fun is gone with your gag reflex on hair-trigger mode.

But the strong ammonia smell of a fermentation indigo vat just smells like tough love perfection. However, it is impossible and impractical to keep a fermentation vat going throughout the year. Too much constant maintenance, way too expensive, and the vat is mostly used by students and friends and they tend to dump in anything for the thrill of watching it turn blue.. You have to be very gentle dying with a fermentation vat and it is impossible to keep an eye on who is dying what. A good friend once dyed a heavy duty hammock he picked up in Thailand in the best fermanatation indigo. Must have been a good $200 indigo dye job on a $5 hammock.

Now I make a fementation vat once a year using my own home grown indigo if there is some very good stuff needing a dye job.




The buildup sludge of exhausted pigment, slaked lime and hydro sulphate at the bottom of the vat. I dyed a full day to use up as much pigment as possible. I threw in some old sheets to absorb as much hydro sulphate as possible and neutralize the pH. These I dried in the sun and then put them out in regular burnable garbage. Then I siphoned off the dye liquid. How to get rid of this muck at the bottom is the problem. I dribbled in water for one night and let it go down the outside drain that goes into a river nearby. It would be like dumping in a bucket of bleach if I did it directly so I prolonged the process. It didn't really work and the muck was still in the bucket in the morning. I spread it out to dry and them I'll put it out in the burnable garbage. The exhausted hydro sulphate being the bad guy here.

A fermentation vat is easier on my conscience to throw away. The shock is the high alkaline and that can be soved with the dribble technique.



This little creek crab seemed to like the blue water. It was horrifying and I got him out of there and washed up and placed upstream in a flash.





Add enough slaked lime to get a pH reading of 12. Do this before you add indigo pigment so that the pH test paper doesn't dye blue. The orange paper is a more specific pH test paper used for a more accurate reading. German made electric pH readers are not so expensive and very easy to use for people not used to keeping an indigo vat.





Next add the indigo pigment itself. I use Konya brand I purchase from Seiwa. It is expensive but very very high quality.



A fresh indigo vat ready to use on a misty autumn afternoon.