Kawaii!

The astute reader will have noticed that I'm not speaking French today, but that I've learned a Japanese word from Mami! Kawaii means 'pretty', and Mami used it to describe Cath Kidston, but I made a very pretty Japanese thing this weekend: Yes, reader, I went! The Alterna'town festival was very good. The round table discussions looked rather heavy (the one on taxes, when I went on Saturday morning, was six men getting pretty heated, so I gave that one a miss...) but the conferences seem to have gone well - our neighbour went to most of them and appears to have found them helpful.

I, however, gravitated towards the more hands-on, less linguistic side of things, and discovered this:

A workshop on vegetable dyeing, using indigo. Ahhh - the chance to hand-produce some blue clothes and fabric!

Dominique, our workshop leader, explained how the family of indigo plants is quite a large one, and includes the famous pastel, known in Britain as woad. Ancient Britons used to war-paint their faces with this, and one imagines them looking quite fearsome, but in France pastel was used for more peaceful purposes, and Toulouse became a very rich city in the 16th century as the centre of pastel production. First the Indian indigo trade, and then the introduction of chemical dyes, burst Toulouse's 'pastel bubble' (it really was a financial crash), but now the natural, local dyes are rightly popular again and you can see wonderful pastel-dyed clothes for sale locally. The big centre of production is now in le Gers, not far from us. Follow that link if you like blue - it's a beautiful site (in English)!

Dominique had her indigo (not pastel, I think) heated to 70 degrees in a big pot. Indigo is the only vegetable dye which does not need to boil, and does not need a mordant to hold in the colour. It does, however, need to ferment a bit for the blue colour to be released from the plants, and the pot was pretty stinky!

We had been asked to bring a piece of cloth or a T-shirt. Dominique showed us her own example, using a little cotton bag she'd been given by another stall-holder at the festival, and then advised us on how to devise a dyeing technique suitable for our own pieces.

She advised that I do my secondhand T-shirt using classic African tye-dye, which worked well... Most of the others used the Japanese techniques of shibori - again, do click on the link, because the website I found explains it a lot better than I could!

First, soak your tied-up parcel in water.Then dunk it in the indigo vat...A short dip will produce a soft blue shade, a longer dunk gives stronger colours...

Remove when ready, and watch the magic - it's yellow! No, it's green! But I wanted blue!

The fabric is briefly yellow, and then green for a longer while, because the blue only appears as the pigments become oxygenated in air or water.

They need another rinse in the water, and then they can be unwrapped...We were warned not to make holes as we snipped off the strings. This seemed like very heartfelt advice! In goes some shibori...

And once it's been dunked and rinsed, it's time to unwrap...

The green is still visible as you unroll, but it fades as you go.Kawaii! This one was made by another member of the workshop. It's an amazing technique.

Here is Dominique, in various shades of indigo herself, showing off my T-shirt!

The little bag was dunked twice: once in string to give the stripes, and once as a brief dip to lightly colour the whole fabric.One of the young girls in the workshop saw my T-shirt and said in surprise : 'It's just like you get in the shops, only it's natural!'Having been in Dominique's workshop, I asked permission to take some photos of her stand.The wools are such high quality. It almost makes me wish I could knit!

Almost... Here's one quick photo of the rest of the festival - I liked the Nepalise bunting.So that was a very worthwhile visit to the Alternative Living Festival! I'm ending this post with some photos from a magazine which I've been promising Sarah, from A Beach Cottage, for a while. (She's having a giveaway, folks - do pop over!)Sarah found a window in a skip the other day. It reminded me I'd seen this great window photo...... in a French Beach Cottage!
I hope that gives you some ideas - I love the way it's been set up, myself. Tomorrow, plenty more weekend news...