People ask me where I get my ideas, and I say everywhere. It appears I’m not the only one. I also tell folks not all my ideas are good ones, but I just get so many I pick the better ones and work on them. I have so many ideas, I’ll never be able to act on a tenth of them (which is probably a good thing!), but I’m clearly in the habit of finding inspiration in many places.

And as for teaching, I always tell my students to feel free to ignore my ideas if they don’t work for them. The purpose of my ideas is to let the student figure out for themselves what will work for them. If my idea creates a “yuk no, that won’t work” response, that’s GOOD, because it has helped my student learn one more thing about what they do or don’t want to do!

Twyla Tharp wrote on P. 10 of The Creative Habit:

“Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it.”

BINGO!

And speaking of raw material (literally), I’ll have a new post tomorrow about my hand-dyed fabric from Carol’s class. Cheers!

So…what were my favorite things about the class:

Obviously, the class itself, ALL of it, and the dyeing and the color!

Meeting Fay, from Manjimup, Australia! We had met via the Dyers’ List (an online forum that sticks VERY closely to the subject matter, not any real chat there), when I asked if anyone else from the list was attending the class. Here we are at the end of the class.

Next time, I’ll have to visit her, and from the looks of the region, boy do I ever want to go there! Fay told me (if I remembered correctly) that Manjimup comes from the Aboriginal, meaning place of water. She was so impressed about our northeastern US as being so full of water: streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, seacoast. I did tell her that out west it is arid, more like most of Australia, but her astonishment at all the water was interesting…it shows what we take for granted here! To see pics of her corner of the Earth, click here and here.

Meeting Vicki Jensen (here’s her blog), who organizes all the classes at Pro Chem (and I suspect she does a lot more, too, for the day job), who is also an amazing artist in her own right. She was working on some felted pieces for which she had dyed the wool, done the felting, dyed the linen on which it was to be mounted and more…I was having severe lust! It also makes me realize that in time, when I actually have some time to think (and at the tail end of summer, it has been *months* since I’ve been able to do that with two haywire boys underfoot), I’d love to explore other fibers and textures to include in my art. That, and learn to use potato dextrin..check Vicki’s blog and scroll down a bit….yum!

Seeing 266 Third Street, Fall River, Mass. I had been there once before to visit my Aunt Mary M. in 1971—which was 72 years AFTER my dad was born in that house 107 years ago, on January 22, 1899

(no, that’s not a typo…he was that old! almost 59 when I was born). I didn’t recognize the house, but finally spied this foundation, and new it had to be the same house, split into two flats as before (two mailboxes, two satellite dishes!)

Seeing the work of the other women in the class. Sandra works with yarns and weavers, so instead of yardgoods, she dyed a t-shirt, which I would love to duplicate:

Sharon is an accountant in her day job, and equally precise (a trait I sometimes envy but seldom achieve–her folding was meticulous!) in her tie-dyeing “other” business:

Suzie K’s cloth…she makes art cloth, and am sure she will do more and more to this piece, which I also love just as is. And in the “it’s a small world” vein: she and her hubby were assigned to the US Embassy in La Paz, Bolivia, and left there at most two months before Paul and I arrived there in 1987! Who knows…maybe it was her Keepsake Quilting catalog I found in the Community office that opened the doors to the world of quilting for me!

I’m not sure who made this piece…Judi? It is FABULOUS! This came out of the dryer as we were finishing up day 5 and I’m so glad I got a picture!

I’ll do one more post in a couple of days, about my pieces (none of which are as “eye candy” as these pieces, but what the heck!)…. have a good weekend everyone!

WOW what a five-days! Here’s a picture of the “Color Bible” that prompted my quest to take this workshop with Carol Soderlund (alas, I have lobotomized her here…Sorry Carol!)

If you have ANY interest in dyeing fabric and want to be able to achieve a specific color, start saving to take this class NOW (the picture above is what two of the color sample pages look like–click on the link to Carol’s website here and see what ProChem has to offer here–ProChem will post the 2007 schedule by late Sept. in time for Oct. 1 sign-ups). I heard about this class three years ago, maybe a year after Carol started teaching it. Between moves and illnesses and scarce funds, it has taken until now to get to it and it was worth EVERY penny. I’ll blog about it a few times, but here is the first entry.

Some of you may have heard of the “Color Bible,” also described as one of the things you grab when running out of your burning house….you end up with 1053 color samples, including recipes on how to exactly reproduce those colors on any white cellulose fiber. WOW! I took the class at Pro Chem, one of the two largest dye-houses in the US (the other being Dharma in California). Since Pro Chem is in Fall River, about 6 hours from where I live in Maine, it was easy for me to reach by car. The classroom is in the ProChem facilities, and though utilitarian (in an old mill building) has LOTS of natural light, lots of space, four sinks and washer/dryer…perfect!

We began by measuring (Carol actually did the measuring for this first part, but this is what it looks like when you do it yourself–that’s Grace on the left and Carol observing on the right). The key thing to remember is (unlike many dyebooks teach you) that it is the weight of dye-powder that dyes the weight of fiber (as in, X grams of dye will color 100 grams of fiber this color, in this depth of shade / value). Water does not dye cloth…it just distributes the dye. This is a critical distinction!

We did a seven-step gradation using three different primaries (pure dyes) in three different color “families” (a total of nine dyes, three yellows, three reds, three blues). The fifteen students were divided up into three teams of five. We had six buckets (the seventh level is the one that included zero of a given color, so a pure green would have yellow and blue, but not red…it was surprising to see that some purples actually have yellow, some greens have red in them, etc….).

Here’s a shot of my bucket on the second dye-bath (after yellow, adding fuschia)

and we stirred and stirred and stirred (to get level colors..this is called a full immersion bath).

Then we rinsed, and washed, and did the second and third rounds of dye-bath gradations (a different round for each of the three primaries). Then we sorted the samples (all of which were carefully labelled of course so we could tell what was what).

Then we ironed, stacked, and labeled. Isn’t it BEAUtiful?

Then we cut, (this is Fay from southwestern Australia and Debby from North Carolina, my wonderful tablemates)

and eventually taped our one inch squares onto the blank pages awaiting the colors of our Color Bible. (Note: Carol calls it a color book….most of her students call it “The Bible!”) Here’s a picture of Carol showing us how to cut and then sort umpteen ga-gillion strips of cloth without getting them out of order (think what would happen if you had over one thousand one inch squares in subtle color gradations on the table and a breeze blew…..or cat or child flew by…)

Carol is SO amazingly organized and orderly….I *could* (probably?) do the math and figure all this out, but it is so nice not to have to! As she said, this is a “left brain” class, so that you can later go wild with the right brain. It doesn’t involve all that much math, and what you do need to do is simplified by using metric (yes, it really is easier).

I cannot tell you how MUCH I learned in just one week…..probably about 20 years’ worth of experimenting. It will be so nice to actually end up with the color I want on the first try… now, I have my cylinders to measure, my recipes and Bible of colors, and need to order my scale (I have been converted…toss out the teaspoons and measure, it is faster and more accurate)….more soon, provided blogger (now that it has finally let me upload photos) will let me post again!

What you say? No…not bedbugs! Well, these wonderful creations are thanks to Garry, from the Phillipines, who was on the housekeeping staff and in charge of our stateroom (and it turns out visited Bar Harbor and Acadia, Maine, while working for a different cruise line years ago and love it here in Maine!). Like the dining staff, he had been briefed, knew our names, the kids names…great personal touches. The first night (on which I failed to take a picture…me bad!) we returned from dinner to find that our stateroom had been readied for night…the boys’ berths set up (they are stored in the ceiling or disguised as a sofa during the day), our bed turned down, chocolates left on the bed (!!!) and a walrus made from a blanket on the bed. Every night thereafter we found new friends:

A lobster:

A scallop:

A dog:

A crab (the day Garry found my spare glasses and put the to excellent use!)–along with the lobster my favorite:

and a cobra:

The kids had LOTS to do on board, and one day even learned about making towel critters. They had activities for all age groups (including teens). When you sign aboard the ship, you each get a room key (credit card style) including the kids. The parents can sign a child into an activity center (they moved each age group from place to place to keep them from getting bored….if you wanted to, you could check your child at 8 am and not see them again until 8 pm! of course we didn’t do that, but you get the idea…). A family is issued a pager at the start, so if there is need to contact the parent (injury, tummy ache, lonely, the staff could reach the parents at a moment’s notice) they can. When you pick up your child, you not only have to have your adult’s key card scanned and match, but ALSO know the special password your child picked as a double-safety. COOL, and safe, and FUN!

Anyway, one of the activites one day was actually learning how to make a monkey out of a towel! Eli make chocolate chip cookies, they played computer games, games up on the “basketball” court on Deck 10, all sorts of cool stuff! Joshua was less impressed…he is almost but not quite 13, and in most respects (alas) a teen in outlook and attitude. However, since he wasn’t 13, he was required to be in the age 10-12 group, and felt most of the activities for him were too “kid.” Still he was good, watched movies on the TV in the stateroom, would walk the promenade deck (level 4) for me for some exercise, and really had fun on our excursions (more about which on another day!). That ‘s it for today!