Tien and Carrie and I drove up to Covelo, CA Friday afternoon for our long-awaited trip for a three-day private study with John Marshall, who is the American master of the Japanese katazome (stencil dyeing) tradition.
The drive up was beautiful. We drove as far north as Ukiah, stopped for a nice meal at a restaurant called 'Saucy', and then drove the remaining 63 miles to our destination.
Covelo is a small, very pretty town. I don't know what the population is, but it's pretty small, just a few streets off the main drag. John Marshall lives and works and teaches there in what was once a blacksmith shop and which was subsequently enlarged to become a flour mill. The building is large and commodious and has fourteen-foot ceilings. The chute for the flour from its flour mill days is still there in situ. John's studio occupies the ground floor and a very large porch, while living quarters are on the second floor along with the area where his precious textiles are carefully and lovingly kept in storage.
The first day we accompanied John into his rear garden where he has several huge patches of Polygonum tinct. growing. The plants were mostly in flower, and we picked only the bluest-looking large leaves towards the bottom of the plant. Since this was for a fresh-leaves ice vat, we collected only the leaves that were still cool and moist from the night air, and which had not been kissed yet by the day's sun. Keeping the temperature of the leaves is a crucial part of the process of fresh-leaf dyeing.
After that we went back into the studio with about 300g of the fresh leaves, which were then added to a blender, which was then filled with refrigerated ice water to cover the leaves. This was blended to a pesto-like consistency, and the mixture poured and squeezed through a straining cloth into a bucked with a few big pieces of ice in it. (The strained, ground leaves were set aside for another technique).
The result was ice-cold, bright green vat liquid with ice floating in it, with very bright light green foam on top.
All we had to do then was to soak silk fabric and yarn in it - turning and moving the goods around fairly constantly - and after a while, the silk takes on an absolutely astonishing hue - electric turquoise is the only way I can describe it - and it smells, quite in contrast to the pungent pong of the indigo fermentation vat - rather like a cross between wheat grass juice and freshly-peeled English cucumbers.
John showed us some pieces of silk which had been dyed this way: a few of them had been dyed a dark, saturated version of the same electric turquoise. Amazing.
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