I owe you.
Friday, June 8th, 2007I’m in Vancouver for another four nights and then I’m off again (this time to traipse around London). In the meantime, I owe you so many things starting with my photography presentation from WAY back in March… so here are the bits and pieces:
- Photography for Textiles 2007 Notes ()
- The photos that accompanied the presentation (Quicktime | 2.2 MB). Some of these are awful, awful photos meant to illustrate the evils of on-camera flash, incandescent lighting, bad composition, etc. The series starts off with a few shots I took during studio classes including some food photography shots… and ends with a few photos from my favourite snap-happy bloggers: Jared at Brooklyn Tweed, Cara at January One, and Adrian at HelloYarn.
- The photos that ran on a loop during the Q&A (Quicktime | 2.6 MB). These photos are all mine and all yummy.
The cute little mention of my stilettos and weaving in this past issue of Handwoven magazine reminded me that I was supposed to blog about Catharine Ellis’ woven shibori workshops. Ooops. Now I’m hanging my head on that one… I ended up coming home from Fiji without enough time to do the preparation work for the workshops… so I didn’t attend. I did, however, carry Catharine’s book all over Fiji with me in preparation for the workshop… but attending the workshops meant weaving actual yardage or warping up a table loom beforehand. Ahh well. Her lecture at Heritage Hall was quite inspiring, as she showed photos and projects from the last 30 years of her weaving career. Experimenting with one variable at a time in a very scientific way, it’s like a do-it-yourself PhD in weaving. I know for certain that I can’t be that methodical. No PhD for me.
Check it out, Louisa wrote up her experiences at Catharine’s workshop…
Speaking of Fiji, I did take notes of the teeny bit of weaving I found in Sigatoka… these are the notes that I just re-discovered on my laptop:
2007-04-19
We got in the car and just started driving… our destination was Pacific Harbour, about 2 hours drive away from Nadi town. The closest town centre to Nadi is Sigatoka, about 45 minutes south. We stopped just to look for water and snacks, but ended up wandering into La’s shop. La has been weaving professionally for the last ten years, weaving mats. When I told her I was a weaver too, a smile spread across her face with understanding and appreciation, saying simply “when you find something you enjoy, you just have to do it.”
For the mats, she determines how wide she wants the mats to be and then begins weaving down the length. At the very end, she finishes the two short ends of the mat, sometimes incorporating different colours in a variety of patterns. The mats take at least a day to weave.
Tapa cloth is made from pounding mulberry bark into flat sheets. The sheets are then screenprinted with a dye made by boiling the mulberry bark and mixing it with the red earth/clay that seems to be so readily available. The darker colours have soot added to the mix to deepen the colours. For tapa cloth intended for village chiefs, the mulberry bark is dyed first with the mulberry juice so that it takes on a dark amber colour before it is flattened out into sheets. The Fijian tapa are screenprinted while the Tongan tapa are handpainted. The tapa made in Tonga are also backed with synthetic, fusible interfacing for strength.
