Creating an imagined landscape with natural dyes, fabric painting and slow stitching… a time to travel in place.
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| Painted and printed fabrics dyed with natural dyes. |
I had a most enjoyable experience taking a workshop with Arounna Khounnoraj [Bookhou] and several artists and friends at Shakerag Workshops. The Imagined Landscapes workshop—comprised of mark making, surface design, natural dyeing, and lots of hand stitching—was a slow, more intentional, and much needed change of pace.
Surface design
In the Imagined Landscapes workshop, participants made marks on fabric with brushes, textile paint, and a soy milk mordant.
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| Painting with textile paint. |
I got to experiment printing with a wood block that a friend gave me earlier this year. I printed on a commercial batik fabric as well as an unbleached cloth.
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| Block printing on a batik fabric. |
It took a little time and concentration to line up the block with each printing so the overall pattern would be preserved.
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| Block printing repeat. |
After mark making with paint and mordants, the fabrics were dyed with natural dyes. Most of the dyes required a heat process to set the color while the indigo dye pot did not.
The natural dye pots included madder, marigold, onion skins, avocado, iron, and indigo.
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| Beautiful flowers on the indigo vat. |
The dyes revealed beautiful shades of rosy red, yellows, light beige, greys, and blues on cellulose fabrics.
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| Cotton fabrics dyed with natural dyes. From left: marigold; onion skin overdyed in indigo; madder; avocado; indigo. |
Hand embroidered linens that I picked up at a local thrift shop were overdyed.
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| Embroidered linens (center and lower right) from a thrift shop were overdyed in onion skins and indigo. |
The imagined landscapes
The landscape compositions were created from the hand dyed fabrics that were basted and then appliquuéd to the quilt sandwich.
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| Composition layout with basting. |
I usually appliqué shapes onto the quilt top (prior to basting a quilt sandwish), however Arounna, our instructor, likes to see the stitching on the back side of her work. This was an interesting concept to me so I decided to try this method. It was a way to appliqué and quilt in a single process. Some of the fabric edges were turned under and some were left raw and frayed. I think my imagined landscape benefited from both.
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| Raw edges and turned edges for appliqué pieces. The appliqué was done through all layers of the quilt sandwich. Most of the knots were buried in the batting layer. |
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| An imagined landscape (work in progress). |
One of my fellow students, Roz, suggested I keep the outer borders of the composition freeform (not finished the perimeter with a binding or facing). I decided to take this route and I plan to finish the piece by mounting it on a frame or a stretched canvas.
Hand stitching and inspiration
Stitching inspiration came from teacher demonstrations, group conversations, and suggestions from fellow students. We had quite a group of experienced and creative textile artists in the workshop! As an advocate for slow stitching and visible mending, Arounna discussed and demonstrated embroidery and mending stitches as well as how she does hand piecing.
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| Arounna demonstrating hand piecing. |
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| The “baseball” stitch is good for mending tears on garments. |
Origami triangle pouch
With scraps and small leftover bits that were too precious to toss, some of the students created small origami treasure pouches.
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| Triangle treasure pouch. |
The pouches are a bit like fabric origami. So cute!
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| Origami fabric pouch. |
Arounna is a wonderful teacher and a prolific author. She has published five books thus far and teaches workshops internationally. If you ever have the opportunity, take a workshop with her! Or pick up one of her books (I have her Punch Needle and Contemporary Patchwork books) and enjoy the slow stitching process.
