This is a beautiful film by Benoit Millot about linen, a fabric I simply love for all kinds of reasons.BE LINEN MOVIE from Benoit MILLOT on Vimeo.
In Kyoto last week I went along to Aizen Kobo, a natural indigo dyeing workshop in an old machiya house, located in the Nishijin textile district. Owned by indigo dyer, Kenichi Utsuki, this place was a real pleasure to visit. Ken-san is very passionate about natural indigo dyeing and will patiently talk you through the difference between what he does and chemical indigo dyeing processes. His kobo (workshop) is located in a very large machiya which is pure bliss to explore with Ken as he shows you samples of the fabrics he has dyed and his wife Hisako has designed into finished products.
Check out these vats of indigo dye in the process of fermenting! I won't lie - they did smell a bit as you would expect from a natural fermentation process.
And here is the front of the machiya where Ken's kobo is located. He has a lovely shop in the front where you can go crazy looking at all that gorgeous shibori dyed fabric he has on offer. Needless to say I did not leave empty handed.
The resulting print: 3 colour repeat screen print on calico of my slightly deco influenced flower motif. Do I have table envy of what after using that lovely long one again at I&S? Try as I might I can't replicate this amazing set up at home.
My design prep for a 3-colour repeat screen printing workshop with Harvest Textiles at I&S studios tomorrow. I think I'm going to use this motif I designed and put together using luscious black sumi ink. The repeat you can see in the background is what it looked like once I scanned it into Photoshop and played with the colour. I wanted to get an idea of how it might look in repeat before I committed to it big time on fabric. I'll be adding one more colour to the mix. Should be so much fun!
Layers of screen printing on fabric. Screens made from hand cut stencils while at day 1 of the wonderful Harvest Textiles 2 day printing workshop. The deep red coloured design was inspired by banksia pods. It was so lovely to be in the beautiful Ink & Spindle studio all day today printing these. More printing tomorrow too :)
Drum roll please.......the PJ pants are complete! Yay! Mind you it took about 10 goes on scraps to master button holes. It turned out I just had to tweak the setting on my machine to make them happen properly. Two button holes are needed in the waist for the bias tape to come through at the front. So no actual buttons. They're a comfy fit. Nice wide leg pants (though that's hard to see in the photo where I'm modelling them) and damn easy to sew if you already know how to do button holes. I will confess my one error: I accidentally sewed the front of the two legs together so it looked more like a skirt. This was because I was following the drawings in my Japanese pattern book and misunderstood where they were going. So 10 mins or so of unpicking commenced before I could remedy the situation. I had a good laugh about it though.
For those of you who want the detail here's the book I used. Pattern Q. It calls for PJs with fancy leg edges on 3/4 pants but I just used ordinary fabric and made them longer. My fabric (surprisingly) was found in Spotlight. It's extremely light weight cotton and good for PJs I think.
