January 2025 Workshop: David Owen Hastings

From David Owen Hasting’s discussion of his workshop:

The lure of indigo is strong — the classic blue and white combination found in many Japanese textiles is cool, crisp, and so appealing.

CLASSIC, COOL BLUE AND WHITE PAIRED WITH MODERN DESIGN

6 hours: From classic kimonos to denim jeans, indigo has been used by many cultures for dyeing cloth, and the Japanese have refined the use of indigo to an art form. This is the class to use all those lovely blue and white shibori fabrics you’ve dyed yourself, or use carefully curated blue and white fabrics from your stash.

Each participant will develop a simple geometric block design based on unfolded origami shapes, set a theme and create variations, and combine them into the beginning of a fresh and modern mini quilt top

We will start out by stitching practice blocks from blue and white paper, to explore composition using minimal, modern shapes inspired by origami. A PDF will be supplied with blue and white images of fabric, which you can print at home or at a local copy center.

We’ll then translate our ideas to fabric, and I will demonstrate simple pattern making using cereal box cardboard. You will choose between three possible modern designs for your blue + white quilt top.

If you don’t have any Japanese-inspired blue and white fabric already, I recommend purchasing vintage Japanese yukata cotton fabric from OkanArts.com, where they have specially curated 3-yard packs available for your project. Please stick to the blue and white theme. You will want to have some solid dark blues plus some whites/creams to blend with the patterned fabrics.

See David’s discussion of workshop on Youtube!