2024 Classes

I'm a textile artist based in Wellington New Zealand and I teach a range of dyeing, printing, quilting and bookmaking classes. The first classes for the year are usually the indigo dyeing classes as they are much more fun if we can hold them outside!

This is a list of my current bookings

Indigo Dyeing and shibori - Tawa College, Tawa, Wellington. There are still spaces in this class.

Saturday 9th March 10-4pm.

Karori Art and Craft Rooms, Karori, Wellington.

Printing on Fabric - 24th February 10-4pm

 This class can be booked online here.

Inspired by Boro (quilts/patches) - 25th May

Crazy Piecing - 30th June

Sashiko - 27th July

Quilt As You Go bags/placemats/table runners. - 10th November

Hutt Art Society Rooms, Lower Hutt

Indigo Dyeing and Shibori - 3rd March 10-4 (Class Full - waiting list available)

Komebukuro Bag - 2 classes - 7th April 1-4pm, 12th May 1-4pm.

Inspired by Boro (jacket). 4 sessions - 16th June 10-4pm,  (Class Full, waiting list available)

21 July, 4 august, 25 August, 1-4pm.

New Zealand Quilt Symposium

I have been invited to teach at the New Zealand Quilt Symposium 2024. This is to be held in Cambridge in the North Island of New Zealand. 

The classes are not confirmed yet but I hope to be able to tell people soon.

Indigo Dyeing classes in Wellington, New Zealand

Here are some photos of students work from some of my indigo dyeing workshops. These are great classes and mostly held outside so there is great ventilation! In the next two months I have three workshops booked. I only run these classes in the warmer months so book in now if you are interested as it will be a whole year before they are offered again.

If you are interested in enrolling please click on the links.

Saturday 25th February 9-3pm. Tawa College, Tawa, Wellington.

This class will focus on shibori using multicoloured fibre reactive dyes as well as indigo.

https://www.tawacomed.co.nz/Course,Indigo-dyeing-Shibori...

Saturday 18th March 10-4pm

Shibori using indigo at Hutt Art Society Rooms, Lower Hutt.

https://www.huttart.co.nz/copy-of-classes-3

Saturday 25 March

This is a class run by Kapiti Quilters. If you are interested in joining them and you are not a member the price is $60 ( it’s subsidised for members). If you are interested in this class let me know and I can give you the coordinator’s contact details.

A few things I've made in 2017 so far.

I used to say that I was a quilter, then i started saying I'm a textile artist. Now I do a whole variety of different things that have to do with textiles. It would be impossible to make a living in New Zealand as a textile artist so like many people I do a whole variety of different things to earn a living. These are just a few things that I have made this year so far.

Over the last two weeks I have been making seagull costumes for a theatre group. They will be performing  during the Capital E arts festival in Wellington. Its been a time of experimentation but also great fun. Thank you to Anna Maea Chitara for making the beaks.

I finished the seagulls yesterday so today I started work on a quilt commission. In this case its a Grandmothers Flower Garden quilt which I was given to finish. I did a similar job last year with an almost identical quilt. This one is for a man who inherited it from his Great Aunt. It is King bed sized was almost finished except for about 10 rosettes in one corner. I removed a row down one side and moved those into the corner. Next I will add borders and send it off to a commercial quilter to quilt, then I will add the binding.

Earlier this year I taught an indigo dyeing/shibori workshop for The Hutt Arts Society. Here are some of the dyed pieces that the students produced. Luckily it was a nice warm day although very windy which made it hard to work outside. Its been like that all summer really in the Wellington region.

The start of the year is also when all my classes seem to need class samples at once. These are for simple 'quilt as you go' classes at Nancys Stitch Studio in Wellington.

Shopping bag class sample for Nancys Stitch studio

Table runner using fabric I won  in a charity raffle  at Monterey Quilters

detail of quilt as you go table runner

I have also made a lot of piped cushions this year. I turn people's tapestries into cushions one day a week at Nancys Stitch Studio in Wellington. Its great to spend time in the shop, its a nice change from working at home alone.

Here are a couple more oddities made this year, I've made 3 of these giant wetas so far.

Summer Art School

I will be teaching an indigo dyeing workshop at the Hutt Art Society rooms in January 2017.

Click below to go to the website

http://media.wix.com/ugd/313b3e_a16c7cebe19e4afe9f3728d0bdc7b8d3.pdf

Thu 12 / Fri 13 January 2017 All levels
9.00 – 4.00
Painting Studio

Students should be able to dye several metres of fabric each and try it a range of different Shibori ( upmarket tie dye) techniques. The weather will be warm so we should be able to lay the fabric out on the grass around the rooms. 

My new studio!

I have a new sewing room/studio in my house. Its really nice to have the extra space as a lot of my 'stuff' has been left stored in the little room I had previously. Hopefully both sons won't want to come home to live at the same time as we now only have one spare room.

Anyway, to celebrate the new room I have started teaching private beginners patchwork, collage/ appliqué and machine quilting classes. I also hope to run some very small classes during the week and some play days for small groups who want to try out different techniques. I'm also happy for people to do 'studio visits' (just ring first) or can arrange a short private class for overseas visitors who want to make a memento of New Zealand. Just get in touch to let me know what you would like.

The first small group play day is Indigo dyeing and shibori.

If anyone is interested in indigo dyeing while the weather is warm ( indigo likes warm weather) . Possible dates are
Saturday 20th February
Friday 18th March
Saturday 19th March (nearly full)

Email me at smith_c*actrix.co.nz for further details or reply to this post.

Note to Chyfly who commented on my previous blog post, I'm sorry I don't seem to be able to answer your comment so I left a message in the previous post! Thanks for letting me know about the tatters in relation to the barge-man's clothes, that was very interesting and I'd love to know more but couldn't find anything on Google.

Hong Kong Shibori Symposium

The first day of the Symposium had registration, an exhibition opening and welcome speeches etc. The second day was pretty much all the talks in 2 concurrent sessions. Luckily we were all issued great big conference proceedings books because we missed a lot. Most speakers tried to do their talks in English but a large part of the audience were Chinese or Japanese. Simultaneous translation was too expensive so there was a little catchup at the end for non-English speakers which must have been very frustrating for them. A few talks were in Mandarin or Japanese and it really made me realise how important it is to have great images on the screen if you don't understand any of the talk. One speaker did his whole talk in Mandarin and his only image was the title of the talk (also in Mandarin) so I still have no idea what he was talking about.

I enjoyed most of the talks but the demonstrations and mini workshops were my favourite. Unfortunately I missed most of the demonstrations as they were the same day as the trunk show.

My favourite was a mini workshop on Lazer engraving on fabric. This was lead by PhD student 'Carson' (Guoxiang Yuan). Carson also won at least 2 prizes in the exhibitions for some amazing work using the laser engraving. Here are some images.

 The jpg image is loaded into the laser computer and re-sized then the piece of clothing or fabric is put onto the bed of the laser 'cubicle?'. In this picture the laser is engraving the jeans across both legs at once. It is removing the colour from the fibres rather than the top layer of fabric.

 Here is an example of a students laser engraved design.

Here I am with Carson in front of his winning work in the Energy Nexus exhibition. The paler areas are made with laser engraving. This method can be used to simulate worn areas on clothing such as jeans much quicker and without use of so much handling, water etc. Look out for Carson I am sure he is going to go far!

Another workshop I really enjoyed was with Michel Garcia. He teaches natural dyeing from a chemist's point of view. He explains why you need certain chemicals and uses non-toxic (often plant based) replacements for most of the dangerous chemicals used previously. I highly recommend his class to anyone who gets a chance to attend one of his classes on indigo or tannins.

I love the idea that I can make an indigo vat with indigo, fructose and lime. Or Indigo, natural henna and lime. Or even indigo, ripe bananas and lime.

Michel Garcia demonstrating how to make two different Indigo vats using henna powder in one and fructose in the other.

 Demonstrating the mixing of mordants which were then printed on white cotton cloth (see below)

Then over dyed with crushed, cooked pomegranate flesh and skins. Each mordant takes up the colour from the pomegranate differently. I will make a link to some websites for Michel Garcia's workshop when our internet is not as slow. I think the kids have pushed the broadband over the limit for today!

I also went to a demonstration/talk by Mr Hiroshi Murase,  about Persimmon juice which is used in Japan as a dye and is called kakishibu. It not only fixes to the fabric with no mordant but can also be used to waterproof things. It reacts to UV so instead of going paler in our high NZ UV, it would go darker. So if anyone in New Zealand - probably in the North - has a  source of green persimmons (maybe they fell off your tree in a storm) please let me know!

Lastly for the day - WOW is going to Hong Kong. A highlights show is going to the Hong Kong Arts festival. The posters were up in MTR stations.

Indigo

While I am researching websites and blogs for the Websearch article I write for New Zealand Quilter I often find things that aren't appropriate for a quilting magazine but are still amazing.

This is from an exhibition called Japanese Suppleness

Then Deb Donnelly sent me a link to another website which had indigo dyed clothing. Called
Heartwear.

Above is an installation called 'Universal Blue' which was at a shop in Paris.

Hand Eye magazine has had some great articles in Indigo. Here is an article on their blog which I subscribe to. Hand Eye. 
Hand Eye is a great magazine and I used to subscribe to it but unfortunately the price for a subscription has gone up a lot since the beginning so now I just buy the individual magazines from Minerva Gallery.

Day 20 experiments

Today I continued using indigo. This time I used an Indigo kit from Jacquard. It uses pre-reduced indigo so is easier to use than the stuff I used last week (color run remover and washing soda). The colour produced was much darker and was the colour I wanted. The whole process ended up messier though. Each piece of fabric needs to be laid out flat or hung up to allow the colour to develop. I highly recommend the kit but also suggest that Indigo dyeing would be better to done outside on the grass. Unfortunately, by the time I decided this, I had already dyed quite a lot of the surfaces blue and spent some time scrubbing them down at the end of the day.

I have a lot of fabric to wash out and get dry. At the moment it is all in a bucket.

The kit was easy to use, is available in New Zealand and the results are very good. There is still enough indigo left in the vat for me to continue next week (I hope). The disadvantage with this system is that it only uses warm water so you get less 'crinkle' in silk. The previous method I used, used very warm water so the silk pieces are left with 3D shapes from the ties. See photo above, these are pieces from the hot water method we used last week.

Here are some of the much darker pieces from today's session with the Jacquard kit. I will post more tomorrow when I have rinsed all the pieces out.

Itajime Papers

Here are some photos of the papers I dyed on Wednesday (day 18), which are currently strung around the room at Whitireia. They are taking a long time to dry and are very fragile at the moment. The paper is Chinese calligraphy paper. It absorbs the dye very well and is strong when it is dry.

Artists Res Day 16

On Friday I  bound a series of scarf lengths which I dyed in Indigo and left over the weekend to dry so that they would retain the shape of the ties. Today I removed the ties but all the photos are on the other camera and the scarves got left at Whitireia in my little office. I will add the rest of the photos as soon as I can. In the meantime, the 2 photos immediately above show one of the scarves knotted and then the scarf opened out. This one was a bit of a cop out as I got lazy and just decided to kot t instead of binding it as that was taking so long.