I am still buzzing a bit from last week. I spent 6 days with two groups of students in The Netherlands teaching what I love so much: natural dyes and botanical printing.
Let me start with the location. I was born and raised in Amersfoort, where my family lived and still does, for many generations. The Koppelpoort is a famous landmark, and we had the studio exactly in the building next to it: Cotton Printing Studio 'De Volmolen".
In the left picture, you can see the Koppelpoort on the right side and the Volmolen is the building on the left with the two red roofs. The workshop where we held the course is the second floor with the small white windows.
The two groups this year were an international bunch, we had people joining us from: USA, Canada, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, the UK and of course; the Netherlands.
For the first course, we dived deep into the classical natural dyes of 18th century Europe, based on the recipes of Antoine Janot: Indigo, weld, madder, and cochineal. We dyed several different textiles like wool, silk, and cotton and made a sample book this way.
Of course, this means we had to learn how to scour and mordant and set up an indigo vat.
The silk chord you see here that dyes so well is
Then we continued working with thickened mordant pastes to create patterns and to dye the samples created this way on very thin handwoven cotton. The final product was a handprinted and hand-dyed scarf