A Follow Up on Claudia’s Class and More

I saw the Sanctuaries hung in the John C Campbell Folk School Craft Shop last week while taking Claudia Lee’s class. My favorite one sold before the week was finished.  And the new director of the school visited our class. He is in the back row  wearing glasses between Claudia and me. A great addition to the staff.

This is Ed modeling my boro shirt that I made from an old boro kimono and some of my own old clothes scraps stitched in. He was one of the eleven students in Claudia’s class last week on paper making for stitch. I took advantage of the indigo pot to dye a long linen shawl from Beautiful Silks in Australia.

My last post I showed some of the indigo and walnut on papers that I made in class. With the dye pot left outside my own studio at home I dropped in a shirt that I wanted to get a darker grey. It was simply iron and black tea bags….very dark. Here is the shirt.

Notice how the buttons colored the shirt when it was wadded up and tied? It will look like I dribbled soup down my front when I wear it. May have to do it again another time.

But once the class was over and the work table outside the studio here still covered with plastic, I decided to go through my earth pigments and use some on the last of the linen scarves brought home from Australia. First one was another large shawl.

Seen from the other end.

My earlier collecting of local earth pigments were placed into urine sample jars that my doctor donated to my cause. They were easy to label and make notations on how many times the soil was sifted to get to a fine pigment. I have so many jars full of these earth pigments but tried to use only the local ones from around here. I was totally hooked on gathering, sifting and storing these but ended up using just a wee bit for making watercolors. So remembering an old reference to John Marshall’s way of using pigments to color cloth, I bought my soy milk and got to do so much more with these scarves and shawls than I could ever do making samples in classes.

Plus my samples in class were quite faded due to lack of time to let the potion sit.

These linen scarves are a much looser weave than the muslin sample above but I have gone over them twice and am leaving them flat on their plastic sheets for at least two weeks before rinsing them out. Here are some more images of the other two scarves and some details.

The Carl Green Green (named for the fellow who let me gather at his motor vehicle inspection center) was very gritty when I used the jar labeled with the notation that it had been only sifted once. After going over all of these again this morning they are coated with a very thick paste of color and soy milk.

I really like these detail images. I might just do them again as paintings in watercolor.

For now the linen pieces are resting on the work table outside. The papers made in Claudia’s class are all put away. My most favorite of them is the nasty bits of thin cotton with abaca pulp caught on the surfaces that were then wax resisted and slathered with black walnut. After I ironed out the wax yesterday they feel wonderful. I will likely stitch them into something that requires handling just because they feel so good. They would never make it through the laundry if I made the shirt I was thinking about.  I think I will so some small shifu swatches to stitch in with them. Maybe even shape the results into a boat or house.

Of course there is always the question of what to do with it when I am finished…..

I will think about that later….

Til next week.