Slightly Off Center

We escaped Market this weekend, went down to Newport for the 26th Annual Newport Paper & Book Arts Festival. Since I've given up Ceramic Showcase, April is a lot more relaxed, so I can take a weekend off without being critically behind on my pottery. Last year, Denise and I took classes together. This year, since her knee surgery, she's a bit more mobile, but still needed the car to get to her venues. Fortunately, my classes were both at the Performing Arts Center, an easy 10-minute walk from our motel. (Her Saturday workshop was fifteen miles away, in Toledo.)

She's been staying at the Rodeway Inn since her first NBPAF in 2006. It's clean, the rooms are generously sized, and it's not too spendy--I think we paid about $70 a night. They've replaced the beds since last year, and the memory-foam mattresses seem about six inches higher (which was a challenge for her) but other than that, no complaints.

I took a two-day workshop in Animated Pop-Ups with Shawn Sheehy, a paper engineer from Chicago, and had a wonderful time. He brought 15 project patterns along; we managed to get through twelve by the end of the second day, and I've got some ideas for adapting a couple of them for future card purposes. I'm also about 90% sure I could teach this pop-up turtle to our local book arts group at a meeting sometime this summer. I've left him my email, so he should be sending me a link to printable pdfs of his patterns to work from, with permission to adapt the structures and use in any non-paid capacity.

The third day, I reunited with Iris, our Indigo and Paste Papers teacher from 2022 for a class in Plant Ink Alchemy. Iris ran us through the chemistry of plant lakes, making red madder ink; insoluble pigments, with blue indigo; concentrating tannins, with a tan Sitka Spruce ink; and perhaps one of the oldest inks we have records of, an iron sulfate/oak gall concoction that makes an extremely permanent black, used for everything from medieval manuscripts to the Declaration of Independence.

Weather was surprisingly pleasant, sunny though cool and breezy. (Of course now that I'm home in Eugene, it's raining again.) Ate supper Wednesday night at Local Ocean, a fairly fancy new seafood restaurant in old town, where we enjoyed crab cakes and crab po' boys and watched sea lion, cormorant and kingfisher fishing the harbor. Thursday we went wandering through the Nye Beach area and discovered Sorella, a nice little Italian restaurant with very good pasta and not-too-bad prices. Friday, we went to an old reliable, Mazatlan, and by Saturday, we were so tired and stuffed that we drove home and had ramen with sliced Easter egg and fell into bed.

Our second, two-day workshop had a mangled Princess Bride quote running over and over in my head.

My name is Indigo Montoya. You killed my Father. Prepare to dye.

Indigo is an amazing material. It's produced by plants on every continent but Antarctica, including three in North and Central America. Cultures all over the world have learned to dye with it, even though it's a mind-bogglingly complicated process. Blue indigo isn't water-soluble, you see, so won't stick to fabric. To make it do so, you need to warm it up and chemically treat it so it has a high pH and a reduced oxidation state. Different peoples have treated it by fermentation, by soda ash, by urine. Our dye baths used a combination of indigo, cal (Calcium hydroxide, used in treating corn for tortillas) and Iron sulfide, the reducing agent.

Reduced indigo isn't blue. The fabric or paper comes out of the dye bath a sickly yellow, which rapidly turns blue with exposure to oxygen. Rinsing in cold water accelerates the change, as cold water holds dissolved oxygen. After a brief rest, the piece can return to the bath a second or third time.

Patterns are created by folding and clamping the fabric, preventing the dye from penetrating. We used popsicle sticks, tongue depressors, chopsticks and spring clamps, rubber bands and screw clamps. Iris also had a wide variety of cut-out forms, geometric or figurative, but I liked linear designs best, so didn't actually use the bear cut-outs. (I know, a missed opportunity.)

We spent most of the first day clamping, dying, rinsing and hanging our work like flags across the classroom. Day two we learned to make book cloth from our fabric, and also experimented with dying paper, with varying degrees of success.

We learned square, right triangle and equilateral folds to make a variety of repeating patterns, then graduated to radial folds, making four-, five- and six-fold symmetry. Denise even managed a seven-fold, making the lovely star below.

We also experimented with partial resists, to get varying shades of blue. The center ring of the double star above was a rubber band that came off for the last thirty seconds of the third dip.

It was a fascinating process, and I was almost tempted to put in a bid for one of the dying vats, as Iris could only fit one in her car going home to Astoria.

Then I looked at my schedule for the next two weeks, and came to my senses.