March 2020

Eber Lopez Ferreira with Alexsandra Oliveira

12 Different Colors from Brazilian Plants

3 Day Workshop and Lecture Session

Sadly this workshop overlapped with the Covid-19 Quarantine Lockdown, so this workshop was held privately between staff and close friends.

Eber Ferreira of ETNO Botanica, a company from Brazil focusing on extracting natural colors from nature through clean and sustainable processes, covered dye extraction processes from 12 native Brazilian plants, while specifically focusing on dyeing plant fibers: cotton, linen & hemp. Eber and Leka taught natural dye application from an industrial perspective, and focused on recreating colors at any weight of fabric. In the future, Slow Fiber Studios staff who attended this workshop will be hosting a review workshop and open sales of ETNO Botanica products to the USA for the first time.

March 2020

Talk, Show & Tell, and Potluck Social

Visiting Yi Minority people in Sichuan and Yunnan, China

Led by Yoshiko I. Wada, Gao Yu, and Slow Fiber Studios China Study Tour participants, Peggy Osterkamp and Cathy Cerny.

In May of 2019, Slow Fiber Studios ventured into southwestern China to experience distinctive textile crafts and techniques of the Yi Minority people. Join us for group reflections on our experience in Yi-country, witnessing traditional garments and elaborate accessories made using processes and materials specific to the culture and land. The travelers will bring examples of textiles they collected in the communities we visited. This talk begins with a potluck lunch and socializing with textile friends.

January 2020

Artist TALKS & Afternoon Tea

Bamboo Dyeing & Quilt Creation Yoshiko Jinzenji from Kyoto, Japan
AND
Han Text in Ethnic Textile & Indigo Work Clothing in Zhejiang, China
Gao Yu from Beijing China

An informal presentation on the work and life of Yoshiko Jinzenji, who is the foremost contemporary quilt artist in Japan and a natural dyer focused on distinctive bamboo coloring from Bali. Her tour-de-force quilt work from 1980 to 2000 chronicles fabric from the renowned textile designer, the late Junichi Arai. She is also well known for the nature-inspired textile making in her Bali studio, which she kept for 25 years working with local artisans. She is a connoisseur of traditional arts and crafts of Japan and China: calligraphy, tea ceremony, cuisine, and incense. She will stage the modern tea ceremony she developed in collaboration with artists and artisans from Asia.

Inspired by his research for upcoming exhibition at Museo Textil de Oaxaca, Gao Yu examined Han characters incorporated into textile designs by minority peoples in China. Most Chinese ethnic groups have no written language so their designs carry cultural stories and beliefs that enrich their lives with colors and patterns. After looking through his family’s collection of Chinese minority textiles, he found that ethnic groups from different regions have adopted the Han characters in distinctive ways. Some convey the original meanings of the characters and others incorporate them as motifs in their traditional design systems. Gao Yu described this rich cultural background and discussed the political and social factors that have influenced the emergence of ethnic-minority motifs within Han-majority China. In the second part of his talk, Gao Yu will introduced a sample of lesser-known indigo-dyed work clothes worn daily by the Han community of Zhejiang Province during the early half of the 1900s.