Karen Miller’s Katazome Class – Day One

What a day!!!  Record heat, no air conditioning in our meeting room, yet a wonderful day shared with good friends, and I learned a lot about Katazome.  A good explanation of Katazome is on our illustrious teacher’s web site – http://www.nautilus-fiberarts.com/ – so I won’t repeat what she discusses so much better than I could.  I can share with you my workshop day though.

It started off around 9:30 with us selecting from the wide variety of photos that Karen brought with her.  We each got to choose 2.  Then off to the copy machine so they could be transferred to our rice paper. 

The next 2 hours were spent cutting out our stencils.  Karen brought mats for each of us and some wonderful blades  for our Xacto tools. They were much sharper than the usual Xacto blades.  Here is a picture of Karen cutting a stencil for her collection:

Next it was time to paint our stencils.  A layer of silk is placed over the cut stencil, and black paint is used to adhere it to the stencil.   Then the stencil is repeatedly turned and blotted with old newspaper that has been spritzed with water.  It took us all morning to get our stencils cut, painted and stacked flat to dry.

A potluck lunch was enjoyed by all – my big contribution was a big tub of Twizzlers.  What can I say?  I wasn’t assigned a dish to bring as I eat yogurt for lunch, but I wanted to share something with everybody, and who doesn’t love candy? 

Then we had a wonderful lecture by Karen illustrated by piece after gorgeous piece of indigo and painted fabric.  Some were antiques, some were made by Karen, and all of them were drop dead gorgeous.  See:

Can you believe these designs came from handcut stencils?  And the cloth can be repeatedly dipped in an indigo bath with the resist not coming off.  Please double click on the pictures so you can see just how tiny the lines are, and the one with the shadow leaves was my favorite. 

We then printed 2 designs each from Karen’s stencils.  It was awfully hard deciding which 2 to select as each one was wonderful.  One was printed onto linen and the other on silk broadcloth.  These are the 2 designs I selected:

And these are the 2 that my friend Donna selected:

Tomorrow we will be dyeing them.  We will have to wait to rinse off the resist, but I’ll be sure to post pictures tomorrow of the medium step, then pictures of the final result when the dyes are cured. 

We ended the day by putting  another coat of black paint on the stencils we cut in the morning.  More spritzing, more blotting, and hopefully, they’ll be dry by tomorrow because we get to use them to print our very own silk scarf. 

Tired as I am, and believe me, I’m tired, I’m so excited by this workshop, I had to put the pictures up tonight.  I hope you enjoy looking at them, as much as I enjoyed today’s workshop.

Hugs…

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