I’ve spent the last two and a half days working with katazome, the Japanese art of stenciled paste-resist dyeing. Friday I cooked up the paste, a mix of glutinous rice flour and powdered rice bran. Saturday, my friend Alfred and I pasted up some pieces – Alfred dipped his in an indigo vat, and I hand-painted some of mine. Here are “before” and “after” shots of my work:

And here are some of the indigo-dyed versions:

Saturday, Alfred and I also completed quite a few new stencils – applying paint and netting to one side, removing the excess paint, and drying them flat. I used those stencils yesterday, producing a ton of half-finished pieces. Here are two of them:

These will come out better than the first batch, I think, as I did them more “properly” than the first batch. Instead of painting onto untreated cloth pinned to a plastic background, I pre-sized the cloth with soy milk (which helps prevent bleeding) and stretched them out by pinning them to screen printing frames. Here’s a pic of the whole shebang:

The Japanese way to do it is to use harite (clamps) on either end of the fabric, then put shinshi (bent pieces of bamboo with a pin on either end) into the selvages. The whole collection is then suspended from two pillars, holding the fabric nice and taut, perfect for painting. However, while I had shinshi, I didn’t have harite, or pillars to suspend the whole affair from – and in any case, for pieces so small it would have been serious overkill. So I used what I had lying around.

I can’t wait to see how the new batch came out. None of the pieces are perfect – there are drips of paste and places where a repeating stencil didn’t come out right – but since they are mostly just samples, that doesn’t matter much. I learned a lot while doing them, which is the important part!

Today I might paste up a few more pieces of cloth, but will probably dip them in an indigo vat rather than do elaborate painting. I have only two more weeks of recovery before I have to go back to work, and as katazome isn’t one of my main interests, I don’t want to “waste” too much of my precious time on it. But it sure has been fun to play with, and I love the results!

And the cats? Fritz was delighted to see my friend Alfred on Saturday, as Alfred has big feet – big enough to stick your entire head into, if you’re a shoe-fetishist cat. Here is a video of an ecstatic Fritz, caught in flagrante delicto with one of Alfred’s shoes.

Things have been moving so fast the last two days, it’s hard to know where to start!

I’ve decided to have a play day on Saturday, doing more katazome with my friend Alfred. I thought it would be interesting to carve more stencils, but wasn’t looking forward to spending hours hunched over a cutting mat. Fortunately, there was an alternative…I broke out a Silhouette Cameo cutting machine (meant for scrapbooking) that I had bought a month or two ago, and tried using it to cut the katazome stencil paper. It is amazing. I tried cutting some very delicate and detailed stencils with it, and it performed with flying colors. Here are some photos of the stencils I made yesterday (click for the bigger photo):

I am particularly impressed by the bottom one, the two flying phoenixes. The faint lines are actually rows of dots almost too tiny to see, maybe 1/32″ in diameter. The cutter cut them out perfectly. There are a number of defects in the design, but they are Adobe Illustrator file errors – the cutting is absolutely perfect. I can’t wait to develop and cut my own stencil designs.

I’m continuing work on the second qiviut scarf – I wove about a foot on it today. I’m being careful because I’m having a (very mild) physical relapse, with some swelling and barely detectable bleeding. I understand now why my primary physician was adamant about not going back to work too soon! I have full mental energy, thankfully, but my body is definitely still healing. And I’m taking lots of naps, which should help speed up the recovery.

I’ve just about finished the book on Adobe Illustrator, and feel much more comfortable with the tool now. Unfortunately, I still can’t draw, which is hampering my efforts at design. So I’ve decided to fix that. I am going to spend the next fifteen days working through Claire Watson Garcia’s Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner, one chapter a day. That will hopefully get me the fundamentals; after that, it’s a matter of practice. I probably won’t have time to make a habit of it, but anything would be better than complete ignorance.

I’m continuing to work on the book – an hour a day for now, but soon ramping up to two or three. I’m also exploring Marian Stubenitsky’s book Echo and Iris, which is (roughly) about structures you can weave on an extended parallel threading. I spent half this afternoon concocting a monstrosity of a drawdown – a tied weave with an echo weave ground cloth. (Four echoes, on a divided parallel threading. Shafts 1-10 and 21-30 contained the ties, shafts 11-20 and 31-40 contained the pattern. The echo weave ground cloth, of course, was woven on all 40 shafts.) I did get it to work, structurally speaking, but the resulting draft wasn’t very attractive. No matter; it was a learning tool, and it worked. I have a better understanding of Photoshop design, tied weaves, and echo weave now.

It probably sounds as if I’m diving into way too many things, but I’m really enjoying exploring multiple areas at once. One of the secrets to my productivity is simply having a great variety of activities – there’s always something to suit my mental and physical energy level, whatever it may be. And being home all day allows me to devote my full mental power to exploring. I have three more weeks away from work while my body heals, and I plan to make the most of them. So much to do, so little time!