Woad is Me!

What a day we had this past Saturday - our Woad Workshop in Elysian Park was as magical as I could have hoped for!
Friday was a different story! I was a little worried, after Denise, our master dyer, had arrived in Los Angeles from France, called me and said pray for me - "pray for you?" - "no", she said, "pray for the mother vat." It turns out, a woad vat does not just appear with a bit of powdered blue dye and a bucket of water. Denise arrived at my kitchen early Friday morning and for the next six hours, she and JZ performed alchemy like I have not seen before! A little bit of this, a little bit of that, a bunch of gurgling in old pots, oh and where's the powdered lime wash? A few frantic runs to the hardware store, paint store and a building supply store and, voila! The mother vat was finished! What a vat it was - I hadn't seen such depth to the color blue since I began woading two summers ago!
Saturday was meant to rain, but the clouds parted ways and the sun shone throughout the day! We had over 1,000 feet of laundry line hung in the park and we dyed over 500 pieces of material - including skeins of wool, linen pants, hankerchiefs and shoes! Everyone learned something new and we all felt a kinship towards each other that one only gets with spending five hours in a field together. Thank you Denise for coming and thank you to all of the students who took a chance and signed up for our very first Woad Workshop - we're ready starting to plan the next one - are you coming??