Dorothy Caldwell Extravaganza 9

Maybe my favorite of everything I made in Dorothy's workshop was an extracurricular project.  On the way to lunch one day, Dorothy stopped in an antique shop and bought a birdhouse, one of two on display.  Overnight she decided she should have bought its brother as well, and on the way to lunch the following day, went back to the antique shop.  I went with her and while she was buying a birdhouse, I found an old photo that called to me.

It was in one of those fancy faux-leather folders that photographers used to present their work, and surprisingly, when I brought it back to the workshop my friend Marti exclaimed that Woltz Studios in Des Moines was where she had her high school photos taken.

Inside was the most beautiful little girl, and in a stitching mood after several days of workshop, I whipped out some silk thread and gave her a pink dress and a gold crown.

I still need to attach the photo to its folder, which I think I will do by simply stitching through both layers.

Dorothy Caldwell Extravaganza 8

We assembled our books with a binding technique that I had never seen before.  First we made signatures of two or three sheets of paper and punched five holes evenly into the spines.  Start on the outside of the signature, stitch in through the middle hole, then up and back through the top two holes in a figure-eight pattern, returning to the middle hole then making another partial figure eight through the bottom holes. Tie the threads together at the middle hole.

Now you have several signatures stacked together into the book, with four sets of parallel stitches along the outside of the spines that can act as a warp.  Holding them tightly together, you can thread a needle with embroidery floss and weave through the warp to make a firm binding.

Or you can simply wrap the sets of "warps" together rather than weave into them.

Dorothy Caldwell Extravaganza 7

Although I've been stitching into different kinds of fabric since I was five years old, I've never done much on paper or other materials.  When it came time to assemble our various markmaking experiments into little books, Dorothy encouraged us to sew things in rather than use glue.  And that led to interesting textures and results.

Here's a haiku that I sewed into one of my books.

Here's a leaf, sewed between two layers of vellum.  The stitching never pierced the leaf; instead, when I got to the edge of the leaf I put the stitches through just the top layer.

Here are two pieces of interesting paper that I found while taking a walk during lunch break at the workshop.  They wanted to be in my book too so I sewed them in.

Dorothy Caldwell Extravaganza 6

Dorothy Caldwell is known as a superb handstitcher, so naturally we did sewing in her workshops. Her favorite stitch is the kantha, aka running stitch, which can be urged into a surprising variety of patterns and rhythms.

Here are the two pieces that I started in the workshop and am still working on.

The top piece started as an exercise in blind stitching, which turned out to be a comfortable exercise for me.  (You put on a blindfold and stitch by feeling where you are.)

Three years ago I worked on a collaborative project with my friend Terry Jarrard-Dimond, who had been introduced to blind stitching in a Dorothy Caldwell workshop and loved it.  We each did twelve hours of blind stitching, in the course of which we got to be pretty good at it.

The white stitching was blind; the blue was added later with eyes open.

The blue details below are more traditional kantha stitches, which I also found comfortable because I had worked with the technique extensively during my year of daily hand-stitching.

On the bottom piece, I wanted to see how the running stitches could go in different directions to set up areas of interest.  (The heavy "drawing" lines are done in coral stitch.)

It's amazing how much you can do with the simplest of stitches!

Dorothy Caldwell Extravaganza 5

Back to unfinished business, showing you what I made in the Dorothy Caldwell workshops last month.

We experimented with many ways to make marks in addition to the obvious use of ink (or paint) with a pen or brush.  Perhaps the most fun was the day we got to burn holes in things -- outdoors, with a big pail of water handy for those awkward moments when things got out of hand.

First we played with a candle, holding the paper carefully above the flame so the soot would waft up and coat the paper.  After the paper got a good layer of soot, you could draw into it with the end of your brush.  We had to use spray fixative to keep the soot from smudging.

Later we worked with incense sticks, useful because they smolder rather than burn, and because you can poke them through your paper to make a nice round little hole.

On vellum, we noticed that white blisters surrounded some of the holes, and upon experimentation found that you could barely touch the incense stick to the vellum and get a trail of blisters with no holes.

On heavy paper, it was hard to get neat holes; the paper was too sturdy to be easily burn/poked through, and when you held the smoldering incense against the paper for a while, it tended to catch fire.  But we noticed that if you held the side of the incense stick against the paper it would char a bold mark on both front and back of the paper.

My favorite material was a crisp, starched organdy, which gave beautiful holes with charred edges.

As you can tell, it was easy to get into a zen of burning holes, and hard to stop.  I may be compelled to do more of this.


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Update:  I'm linking this to Nina-Marie's blog, where each week you can check out what other fiber artists have been up to.

Dorothy Caldwell Extravaganza 4

I wrote earlier this week about how Dorothy Caldwell's art practice is to collect artifacts, both natural and manmade, as part of her endeavors to understand a new place.  I was delighted to observe how she continues this practice even if she's not in an exotic place, but somewhere as unspecial as Louisville.

On a day off between workshops we walked over the new pedestrian bridge that spans the Ohio River.  When we got to the Indiana side, Dorothy pulled a plastic bag out of her purse and proceeded to collect stuff to memorialize this place.  She found some mud to daub on a card, writing the date and place on the back, and then dunked some silk into muddy water to dye it.  She repeated the process on the Kentucky side (even though to my eye mud on one side of the river is fairly indistinguishable from mud on the other).

On the Kentucky side we found some deep footprints in the sand at the edge of the river, partially filled with water that had seeped in.  Dorothy looked around, found a root, and used it to stir up the water into an opaque dye-like solution to color her cards and silk.

Here's the root, the silk, and the card, out to dry in the sun (and the footprint/dye pot).  She took the root home too as a souvenir.

By the end of the week she had assembled a "museum" in her room of her trip to Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.

Dorothy Caldwell Extravaganza 3

As part of her week with us, Dorothy gave a lecture focusing on her activities in the "outback" of two countries, Australia and Canada.  These activities have culminated in a show that has just closed in Peterborough, Ontario, and will travel to two other venues in Canada.

She points out that Australia and Canada are similar nations in many ways:  They're both huge countries with the great majority of the population clustered on the edges, with vast expanses of sparsely settled, ecologically fragile territory that few people ever get to see.  They were both British colonies, with substantial numbers of people who were transported there as punishment.  Both are rich in resources.

Dorothy has been traveling to Australia for 20 years on a variety of travel, teaching, study and artist residence programs.  Recently she received a grant from the Canadian government to conduct two parallel art projects on the two continents; in both places she would go to a remote location for several weeks, getting to know it, collecting both natural and manmade artifacts, and dyeing paper and fabric with indigenous plant and earth materials.  Then she made a new set of works reflecting her experiences.

In Australia, she visited a sheep station in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia, north of Adelaide.  In Canada, she went to Pangnirtung on Baffin Island, 1600 miles north of Toronto, close to Greenland.

"My work is about being in a particular place and using what's there," she said.  "I want to get out into the landscape, experience the land, get to know a place by handling the materials."  For instance, she hiked barefoot on the delicate tundra to get a feel for the tiny, stunted vegetation.

On both these visits she brought Japanese handmade paper, tough enough to hold up in a dye pot, and colored them with natural pigments from plants and earth.  She also collected things like rusty nails and broken tools from the sheep shearers, which came home to become part of the "museum" section of her show.

"Collecting has always been an important part of what I do, since I was a little kid," Dorothy said.  "My way of journaling is collecting."

After she came home from her trips, she made some of her characteristically huge fiber pieces to reflect her travels and learnings.  Here's one inspired by the Arctic summer, with 24-hour daylight that often leads people to stay up all night in euphoria.  Dorothy asked one of the locals how they dealt with not being able to distinguish between "day" and "night" and was both chagrined and charmed at the response:  "When we're tired we go to sleep."

Dorothy Caldwell, How Do We Know It's Night, 120 x 114"

Here's a piece about the fjord on which Pangnirtung is built.

Dorothy Caldwell, Fjord, 120 x 114" 

Dorothy Caldwell Extravaganza 2

The first Dorothy Caldwell workshop last week was called "Human Marks," in which we explored many ways of putting marks down.  We started with paper and india ink.

Here are our brush marks, put up on the wall together to make a "quilt" of marks.

Then we attached our brushes to long sticks to make the lines less controlled and predictable.  We experimented with pale ink washes and wet-into-wet.  There was a stiff breeze as we worked so some of the papers went skittering across the parking lot; a dish of ink overturned onto one of the paintings; mostly we liked the accidental effects.

Here are the finished papers on display.

We cut and folded the papers into stand-up accordion books.

Here's the best part -- when I took my book out of my bag at home to show my husband, I realized that it had a little red mark on its front cover.  I didn't put it there, and in fact I can't recall anybody in the room who was even using red.  But it's perfect!  Gives the book a very oriental flair, don't you think?

Dorothy Caldwell Extravaganza 1

My local fiber and textile art group tries to have an internationally famous teacher come in for workshops every couple of years, and this year we were fortunate to have Dorothy Caldwell with us for a week.  She taught two different workshops and gave a lecture, leaving us all in awe of her beautiful art and energized with lots of new ideas for our own work.

It's going to take me a few days to decompress and digest everything she told us, but to whet your appetite for posts to come, I'll tell you about a tiny skill she taught us, which made me so happy.

It's making string, a skill Dorothy learned from India Flint, who in turn learned it from the aboriginal women in Australia.  They would make their string from plant fibers, mostly thin strips cut from pandanus leaves.  Dorothy likes to use silk or organdy.

Cut or tear your fiber of choice into strips about a quarter-inch wide.  Hold two strips together in your left hand (if you're a rightie) with a half-inch or so clasped between your thumb and finger, and the length of the strips extending off toward your right hand.

Grab one of the strips with your right hand and twist it away from you by rolling it between thumb and forefinger.  (Thumb moves up from the tip of your forefinger to about the first knuckle, as seen in the photo.)  Let's call this the twisted strip.

Now grab the other strip -- let's call it the bottom strip -- between the second and ring fingers of your right hand and hold it taut.

Wrap the twisted strip down in front of the bottom strip so it makes a neat little roll tight up against your left thumb.  Grab it between the second and ring fingers, or let go if you're having a hard time hanging onto two strips at once.  Now this will be your bottom strip, and the formerly bottom strip will be ready to roll between thumb and forefinger.

Get into a rhythm -- twist, wrap down in front, switch your grip, twist, wrap down in front, switch your grip.  Continue till you have made a nice long string.  When you get to the end of the strip, you can hold a new strip down overlapping the old one and twist them together, either tucking the ends neatly inside your roll or letting them stick out from the string like little flags.

So each strip is separately twisted away from you, but the two strips together are wrapped/twisted toward you.  The opposition of the two twists is what holds the string together.  You could achieve the same thing by twisting a string a bazillion times with an eggbeater, then grabbing it at the midpoint and letting it twist back on itself, but this method requires no tools and can be done as you watch TV, ride in the car, listen to a lecture or wait for paint to dry.

If you wet the strips before you twist and wrap, the string will be much neater and tighter.

For a final touch, when Dorothy was in Australia she would rub some of the ocher earth into the wet strips as she made the string, so it ended up with rich colors.  Unless you love the color of mud, that approach isn't going to work in Kentucky.  But we did make beautiful two-color strings with leftovers from hand-dyed silk contributed by a workshop participant.