Touchstone Center for Crafts - African Batik aka Adire

I spent the last week of August at Touchstone Craft.  It was the most rustic of the craft schools I attended this summer.  I was blessed to get a scholarship to cover tuition. I paid for room and board. It's in Western Pennsylvania. I flew into Pittsburgh and then took a Lyft to the campus.  I shared a rideshare to get back to the airport.

This is where I bathed

This is my incredible cold cabin.  I looked at the weather for the county instead of the exact location and came unprepared with all the wrong clothes.  I bought a sweatshirt from the gift shop.  A teacher gave me the hat off her head.  I wore my yoga pants as long underwear and slept in my clothes.  The only time I was warm was the last night when I made a sleeping bag out of large garbage bags I took from the studio.  They also protected me from the dripping roof when it started to rain. The windows wouldn't close.

I took a Yoruba batik workshop with Gasali Adeyemo who I also studied with at Stitch Buffalo.  I was also incredible cold in Buffalo in my lodgings.  I don't know if I want to go anywhere rural again without my car.  I felt so powerless to get the things I needed.

We were in this space

Gasali offered us to stamp with his blocks but this time I wanted to use my own designs.  He hadn't brought the foam on the cutters for us to make our own.  I'll try when I'm up at UC Davis.

Although I can't say I enjoyed being at Touchstone but I made a lot of work.

I came with some stencils to do corn.  I didn't really understand we were doing wax batik.  I thought we were doing casava and I would need the stencils.  I used them anyway to marker trace the corn.

I designed this corn as part of an assignment in RISD Extension as part of the Intro to Adobe Illustrator Assignment.

I made a stencil and marker drew it on the batik.  I think this has 3 or 4 dips.

I did a lot of work based on my designs in Key West.  My first idea was to make some printed fabric for the quilts I'd like to make.

This is the watercolor pattern I designed in Key West.

This is the interpretation I made of it at Touchstone.  The tool we used was kind of crude and I was unable to control it enough to get the detail I wanted.  But I still like it.

I designed to work on some wall hangings.

This was the design I came up with in Key West.

This is it as a batik.  I want to make some more variations.

These are the drowning men without the ship.

This is how you boil the wax off.

This is another piece I did inspired by Key West work. I had designed these 3 fish there.

I had made stencils of those fish before we came to place paste on.  Then I decided to trace them in marker and make a piece without the slave ship.  Even though I had mainly worked in purple as the sea water.  I decided to do these in red,

This one is in green and is based on this design.  Although it's a lot different in scale and proportions.

This is the design from Key West.

This is the batik I made at Touchstone

I had worked on the bell designs in Key West. This bell is how they were able to identify the Henrietta Marie.

This is the batik I made based on that design at Touchstone.

This is a new design. It's the enslaved people either been thrown over board of committing suicide during middle passage.
 

I want to embroider on the slave ship.  I didn't have the control of the tool enough to control the wax.

Again I want to add embroidery.

This is a variation on this pattern I designed in Key West.  It's based on the Adinkra symbol for handcuffs.

Here's the Key West Design

Here's the batik.  I added in purple.

You can see the marker line.  I decided to embrace the marker.

Hopefully when I am up in the Bay Area I can study with the finer more precise Indonesian tools.  But all and all I'm very happy with the work.