Sanborn Mills

Recently I had the pleasure to spend 3 days at Sanborn Mills Farm in New Hampshire, dyeing, printing and painting with natural dyes. It was a deep dive into textile techniques that I am familiar with along with totally new applications, such as direct dye paints and stitched shibori.

Some designs on paper made their way to fabric as test prints in a variety of natural color. It was a great opportunity to explore a wide color palette with sometimes 8 pots of color plus indigo going at the same time. At most, I’m able to have 2 colors going in my home studio. Though the workshop was not about indigo or shibori, I got to try my hand at mokume stitched shibori. After about 5 hours of stitching and knotting, it proved itself to be a beautiful and amazing way to get patterns on cloth.