Slow Fiber Studio Workshop: Puglia, Italy (June'10)

What could be better than an Italian summer retreat in beautiful Puglia? How about one that's designed around textiles and hosted at a historical 18th c. building on 20 acres of private land!

This June, Yoshiko & Michel Garcia will be co-teaching two natural dye workshops (5-day) using methods that are gentle to humans and the environment. Experiment with sericin removal, arashi, itajime, kaiku shibu, and a variety of natural mordants & dye applications. Learn traditional block printing with natural indigo, katazome, shibugami, and making rice paste resists. Workshops (given in English) will be hosted at the magical Masseria della Zingara located in Puglia.

Silk & Natural Dyeing (June 15-19)
Natural Dye Block Printing Provençal (June 22-26)
click for summary of Puglia retreat

ABOUT. Michel is a natural dye expert & founder of Couleur Garance and le Jardin Conservatoire de Plantes Tinctoriales (Botanical Garden of Dye Plants) in Lauris, France. Yoshiko is an expert on Japanese resist-dye techniques including shibori. Masseria della Zingara, or "The House of the Gypsy," is an important building built in the late 17th / early 18th c. and recently restored by its owners, whose first love is textiles (Jan King, Twisted Thread UK). It sits on 20 acres of private land set principally to olives, almonds, figs and cherries and yet is conveniently adjacent to the village of Triggianello. Puglia is the garden of Italy -- an area of baroque towns filled with white-washed trullos, beaches, orchards, sun, and is rightly famed for both its food and wine.

These workshops are part of what we call our Slow Fiber studio project, a term we adapted from the popularized Slow Food movement to articulate similar concerns and philosophies about social responsibility, local traditions, and cultural capital as they apply specifically to cloth, fiber, and the craft of making — from awareness and knowledge to production, tradition, practice, commerce. Visit our website to learn more about tours & workshops of Slow Fiber Studios "SFS"

www.shibori.org
www.masseriadellazingara.com
http://shiboriorg.wordpress.com/projects/slow-fiber/sfs-puglia-italy-2010/