The first day of the katazome workshop was both exhausting and wonderful.  I learned a lot.

Most of the katazome-making process is detailed on John Marshall’s website, so I won’t go into a lot of detail, but here are some shots of the katazome-in-progress:

It took me three or four hours to cut the stencils, mostly because I had chosen such complex designs.

Here are the finished stencils at the end of the day, ready to use:

Somewhere in there we mixed up the resist paste, a mix of water, very finely ground rice bran, and glutinous rice flour – later we mixed in calx and glycerine.  (For a recipe and details on the process, see John Marshall’s website – link at the beginning of this blog post.)

Here is what it looked like once it was steamed:

You could think “diaper goo” but I prefer to think “chocolate mousse”.

Because our own stencils weren’t completed in time, we used some of Karen’s stencils to lay down paste on pretreated fabric.  I used a butterfly stencil:

And a flower stencil:

And here is what it looks like with the paste applied:

Because the paste is a resist, the areas that appear in brown will actually be white in the finished piece, and the white areas will be colored (in whatever manner we want to color it).

Can’t wait to learn about the rest of the process!