Are you new to Indigo or Woad vats and feeling a little nervous and intimidated? So are we!
Join Sharon Kallis ( EartHand
Gleaners Society) and Ivy Stovall (Rewild Portland) for this online
research and support group as we learn and share together.
Ivy is taking on making a sig vat(
urine) and Sharon is focusing on the simple 123 process (sugar method).
Catherine Shapiro will be our special guest and mentor sharing her own
experiences of growing indigo and extracting colour for vats and
pigments.
Once a month we will share our work
to date, set intentions for the next month and do hand work while we
exchange ideas, tricks, tips, successes and challenges. A slack channel
as a communication tool will be an open space for ongoing group sharing
between meetings.
Participants will need their own
fresh or dried indigo or woad, internet access and a device with a
camera/screen to participate. As this is a two-organization,
border-crossing offering, we ask American participants to take a space
through Rewild Portland, and Canadians register through EartHand. When
ReWild Portland spaces are full, Americans can select a remaining
EartHand space (EartHand has more space to allow the Canadian mentorship
honoraria).
Guaranteed to be a fantastic time of engaging conversations and in-the-moment learning for all!
Dates: third Tuesday of the month 7-9pm, 3 sessions Sept 21, Oct 19, Nov 16
Registration-$90. 00 ca funds, $75 US funds
6 spaces for Rewild to offer
Group Hosts
Ivy Stovall
(she/her) delights in the abundance, patterns, and chaos of the natural
world and of humanity. So it makes sense that three years into a
Biology degree, she flipped majors and earned a BA in Interdisciplinary
Humanities at the University of West Florida. Her broad education
prepared her perfectly for her work in outdoor education, which she
began as a 4H camp naturalist, teaching outdoor skills and elementary
and middle school science curriculum in the field. Since then she has
taught high and low ropes challenge courses, ESL at all grade levels,
and developed a North Portland homeschool co-op and independent art,
adventure, and theater camps for kids in her community. These days she
lives and works at The MudHut Kulturhaus, her St. Johns urban
permaculture homestead, where she shares her enthusiasm for outdoor
living and hosts camps, workshops, skillshares, music and theater,
women’s groups, and community celebrations and ritual. She likes to
always be harvesting and keeps her hands busy making herbal medicines,
homebrews and fermentations, botanical inks, dyes and pigments, wild
foods, basketry, and natural building. Always a student and always a
teacher, Ivy enjoys contributing to and learning from the passionate
people of the Rewild Portland community.
Many Rewild kids have learned fire
and knife skills around The MudHut fire pit and know Ivy as the Echoes
in Time kids’ camp coordinator. Ivy loves the creativity, curiosity, and
wildness of young people and is dedicated to the work of building
healthy intergenerational communities connected to and through the
natural world.
Sharon
Kallis (she/her, they/them) is a community engaged environmental artist
and committed life long learner. Learning while teaching- and teaching
while learning – Sharon partners with ecologists, gardeners, weavers and
others with an interest in linking traditional hand technologies to
what we can grow, gather and glean in our urban green spaces.
This ‘one mile diet’ approach to
sourcing art materials has led to experiments in bioremediation through
the up-purposing of invasive plants and park design with planting
choices that foster community connection back to place, the seasons and
our shared pre-industry cultural traditions.
Graduating from Emily Carr Institute
of Art and Design in 1996 Sharon began working materials from the land
in 1999 and has exhibited and engaged communities with her practice in
Ireland, Spain, Mexico and throughout the United States.
At home on the west coast of Canada,
she is the founding executive director of EartHand Gleaners Society. She
has worked extensively with Vancouver Park Board since 2008 and is the
primary steward for two urban learning gardens where materials for
creative production are grown. Somehow Sharon also manages to make a few
items for personal use with the skills and materials she has gathered
along the way. Traditional textiles are at the core of her work, with
stinging nettle research dating back to 2008 and growing flax for linen
in city parks since 2012. Sharon is doing her own cultural work through
cloth and is working to be a better ancestor while living as an
uninvited guest on the unceded land of the S?wx?wú7mesh, S?l?ílw?ta?/Selilwitulh and x?m??k??y??m Nations.
