The thing that started me planning this trip was the workshop that I'm taking this week.  Somehow, I found out about MAIWA, and the fact that a fairly comprehensive natural dye class existed back in May.  I got really interested in it, and also discovered that it filled up extremely quickly.  Opening day for enrollment was a tuesday back in July, a day that I happened to be off work.  It started at 10 AM pacific time, so right at noon, I got online and signed up for it.  I was kind of amazed that I got in, even with the diligence.

The fact that it was in Vancouver was actually a plus.  I'd always been vaguely curious about this city, and it seemed like it would be pretty easy to fly into Seattle, and take the train up the coast, thereby seeing two Pacific Northwest cities in one trip.  And I like have a purpose to be somewhere, so having this class was perfect.  Then, just for the heck of it, I looked up multicity plane tickets, and found that it really wasn't much more to fly to Quito, too.  So I asked for October off at work, and now here I am.

The class started Monday.  I like to go out for coffee in the morning when I'm traveling, and I like to go to the same place everyday, to set up a little routine.  So I took the bus to commercial street, and found a cafe with outdoor seating and tables made out of sections of tree trunk.  They had a little free library, most of which was kind of bad, but I did find a book about the making of one of my favorite movies, Water.  I'm saving that to read in Ecuador.  I walked over to the studio around 945.  It's in a warehouse building.  Downstairs is crammed full of artisan furniture and textiles, mostly from Asia, mostly India.  Upstairs is the studio for classes.  There was a huge table set up, covered with shawls and clothing and tapestry that had all been naturally dyed.  There were also my fifteen workshop mates-all women, all ages, lots of different backgrounds.  Everyone is really nice and interesting-although, we've only known each other three days, and that doesn't reveal anyone's true nature that much.

I don't want to bore you with the details of our class, but it has been very worth it to take it.  Monday we had a slide show of all the various dye plants and their uses, and then we learned about tannins and mordants.  Tuesday we dyed silk, cotton, hemp, wool yarn, linen, etc-I think we ended up with 64 different combinations of dyes, every color except blue.  It was a lot of steamy work, but it was also completely fascinating.  Today we divided up the samples we made yesterday, learned about shibori and started planning the projects we'll finish tomorrow.  Tomorrow we're learning about indigo, and dying a whole lot of different projects-I should really be stitching, not writing this.

The woman who is teaching is the owner of MAIWA handprints and the founder of the MAIWA foundation, which works with artisans to preserve and revive skills in the textile arts.  She is very dynamic, and someone to admire-she seems like she travels constantly, presents all over the world, and runs a complicated business.  And she knows so much about natural dyes and textiles, development work, etc...it's really been a blessing.  I don't want to go to far into it, but one thing that stands out is how bad for the environment new textiles like bamboo and soya are.  It's really misleading, because they've been marketed in a way that makes people who want to do the right thing think that they are.  But the process to turn bamboo into something you can knit with uses a lot of chemicals, and essentially turns it into a synthetic.

Oh!  So much to say!  And so many stitches to make!  Good night!