Classes Offered

Monday, May 4, 2015

Katano dying workshop


The 2015 SAQA Fiberlandia conference is over.  As they always are, the conference was alternately energizing and exhausting.  There is so much to take in, learn from and be inspired by that it usually takes several days to decompress and filter all the experiences through one's brain.  I was pretty tired by the time I got to yesterday's afternoon workshop with Ana Lisa Hedstrom but I wouldn't have missed it for anything.  Ana Lisa did a marvelous job of passing along the very beginning skills of doing katano shibori dying which is using stitching (in this case machine stitching) to act as a resist to the fabric dye.  I was too busy stitching to get a picture of everyone bent over their machines but here we are bringing the samples up out of the dye pots.
We couldn't wait to get all those little sodden pieces distributed to the correct person and start ripping open the stitches.  The four hours went by in a flash.  Below are my four samples that were rinsed out once again today and ironed flat.  My stitching lines on the two tan pieces are pretty light but I thought the blue samples came out great.  They look like x-rays of plants.  Can you see the meadow grasses on the far right and the fan palm leaf next to it? Pretty cool. I can't wait to try more of this.



2 comments:

Jeanne Marklin said...

Looks like a good class in Katano! I'd love to take a class from Ana Lisa - her work is so elegant. Your blue pieces are lovely. I couldn't see much detail in the tan ones. Could you over dye them a shade darker so the contrast showed up better?

Laura Jaszkowski said...

Jeanne, Ana Lisa did say she had mixed two dyes together to form that color but wasn't cray about it. I think the stitching marks didn't show well because the dye color was just a little too light. It is a take away lesson for next time.