{"id":7591,"date":"2026-02-10T15:24:21","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T20:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.argoknot.com\/?p=7591"},"modified":"2026-02-10T15:24:21","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T20:24:21","slug":"rearview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.argoknot.com\/?p=7591","title":{"rendered":"Rearview"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The year 2025 has been twirling around in my head for a couple of months now. I don’t think of myself as goal oriented (although my husband declares I am), but I do feel it helps me if I take inventory of what I made in the past year. It’s taken a me a few weeks to get around to this, and I found that I needed to document some things with photos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main thrill of the past year for me was travel! I have never managed to go so many places in one year as I did in 2025. Bob will take all the credit for that since he sailed our boat Pandora<\/em> to the A\u00e7ores and then on to the Mediterranean, enduring an attack by orca whales to get to his destination, knowing that his trip made it possible for me to see a bit of Europe. Being in the A\u00e7ores for a month, Scotland and the Outer Hebrides for two weeks, and finally southern Spain and Madrid for another two weeks was such an eye opener for me, being immersed in the many kinds of handwork done in these richely cultural places. I’ve written about the A\u00e7ores and Scotland in previous posts. I’d like to write about Spain, but not today. I have developed a new tapestry talk about the many tapestries I saw at Galeria de las Colectiones in Madrid, and I will try to cover that here sometime soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From September until just before Thanksgiving in November, I took the Maiwa Natural Dye Worshsop<\/a>, led by Charlotte Kwon and her daughter Sophena. Every week of the 10 weeks I spent 5 days dyeing, usually about 4-5 hours a day. The workshop came with new videos each week as well as PDFs to print and put in a notebook. The instructions were thorough. I got fabulous colors that led to dreaming about future projects. I gained so much knowledge after decades of fumbling around with dyes and taking short classes at various conferences. This workshop is incredibly in-depth, and I now feel I have a reasonable amount of knowledge, and even better, confidence!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Yum, right? I thought all these samples would go in a notebook, but it turns out we only had to cut a small bit off each skein of yarn or length of fabric, so I have plenty to plan to use in some small projects. Whatever I end up making will be such treasures from this workshop. I have spent about 10 hours cataloguing everything in the journal that came with the class. That’s on the upper right below. The lower left shows all the original dyes done on white and grey yarn, white wool fabric, white silk fabric, natural and white linen fabric, and cotton and cotton\/hemp fabrics. Above it on the left are all the original yarns and fabrics dipped in indigo to change the colors. The lower right shows all the original shades dipped in a 2% iron solution to darken the colors. This is a tremendous cache of color on beautiful fabrics. Now that it’s all safely documented in the journal I want to start making things with these bits of fabric.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The notebook was rather a lot of work–far more tedious than dyeing! So I thought I should make a short video describing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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