Despite this artistic background, my path from drawing fabric to dyeing fabric has been anything but a straight line. I did major in Art History in college (Vassar '75), where I sat in classrooms  looking at slides of Egyptian reliefs, trying to pay attention to the lecture. I'd come away with sketchy notes but with detailed drawings of the decorative motifs surrounding the works of art I was supposed to be studying.

For a long time I felt guilty about my preference for decorative over pictorial art, and (foolishly) did not explore the possibility of a craft career.

I will skip over the next 30 years, saying only that I spent that time as a librarian and as a restaurant cook. I continued to dabble in various crafts, and got interested in quilting for a while, but I realized I was more interested in looking at the fabrics that composed the quilt than in cutting them to pieces. I wanted to make whole fabric.

Then I took a class at the Vermont Quilt Festival called "Sometimes the Best Color is Gray," where the teacher mentioned something about dyeing your own fabric. I had never heard of such a thing! I got some fabric dyes, and began experimenting with the very simplest color gradations. Changing a white piece of fabric into a colored one was wonderful fun. Meanwhile, I was researching fabric dyeing. I soon learned that the Japanese were considered supreme dye artists, and I became especially interested in katazome, or stencil dyeing. My interest in dyeing had to wait a while, though, while I took care of my beloved mother, who became desperately ill with a rapidly progressing case of Alzheimer's disease (she was diagnosed and died within a year, which many people tell me was a blessing, but it was a wild and harrowing ride nonetheless). 

 

After my mother died in 1999, I felt lost in space, untethered. I knew, somehow, that it would comfort me to pursue some sort of artwork, and I decided to explore dyeing wholeheartedly.

In 2000, I went out to California and studied for the first time with the incomparable master of katazome, John Marshall , (opens a new browser window, close to return) a teacher whose voice constantly rings in my head as I work, "Be sure the hera is perpendicular!" "Don't use old rice paste!" "That stencil is way too wet!" I loved katazome from the very first, as it involved so many skills - the drawing and carving of the stencil, the making of the rice paste, smoothing the paste through the stencil, choosing colors, designing and sewing garments. In addition, there was the whole iconography of Japanese design to learn (See? that word "iconography, " which I learned in art history classes so long ago, has finally come in handy).

In 2002 I started dyeing paper and making cards, which I took to the local Farmers’ Market. People bought them! I started making silk scarves...people bought those, too! I dared to participate in Vermont’s Open Studio Tour for the first time in 2003, and sold just about everything I’d made. I entered a Wearable Art Contest at the 2003 Houston International Festival and won a 2nd prize with my rather over-the-top fantasy jacket that was supposed to interpret the phrase, "Along the Silk Road" (I called it "Marco Mixes it Up" due to its references to both Central Asian and Japanese clothing).