Island Day #5

Sunday was divided in two parts-- Butoh Dance workshop and dyeing.

The butoh-derived dance workshop was through ISLAND and I absolutely loved it. (I'd done one before, during Questfest 2010 in Baltimore, MD with professional dancer and professor at Towson College, Naoko Maeshiba.) The workshop yesterday was lead by the owner of the Dhaseleer Events Barn, Cornelia Dhaseleer, who had been a part of the dance and performance scene in Germany when she was younger. The entire time, the emphasis was on continuous movement, play, and listening to your body so you can feel the flow of the movement and know what comes next. The whole thing is very meditative, and is about your experience and how it's centered in your body (which was good for me because when we were asked to perform with an object in front of the group, it de-emphasized the fact that you were being watched). I came out of the workshop feeling energized and refreshed. And promptly went to Fisherman's Island State Park for a walk on the beach. For which I had no sunscreen, so it wasn't a long walk.....

Upon my return to the cabin, I got to work! I began soaking my goldenrod in hot water, did my queen anne's lace dye to be left to sit overnight, did a sandalwood dye to be let sit overnight, and rinsed out the shiboried fabric I had soaked overnight in the osage orange exhaust bath. I thioxed a pound of cotton and mordanted it in Alum/tin-- which is producing some really nice results already. The freshly mordanted yarn got to hang on the clothesline in the sunshine all afternoon to dry. And I came to the realization I'm running out of wool really fast, dyeing up to 5 samples in each dye vat for after mordant testing later.... So I made up more swatches to be mordanted... soon.

Recipes for the above dyes will come with pictures.